The meet up between data, processes and structural knowledge in modeling complex enterprise systems is a challenging task that has led to the study of combining formalisms from knowledge representation, database theory, and process management. Moreover, to ensure system correctness, formal verification also comes into play as a promising approach that offers well-established techniques. In line with this, significant results have been obtained within the research on data-aware business processes, which studies the marriage between static and dynamic aspects of a system within a unified framework. However, several limitations are still present. Various formalisms for data-aware processes that have been studied typically use a simple mechanism for specifying the system dynamics. The majority of works also assume a rather simple treatment of inconsistency (i.e., reject inconsistent system states). Many researches in this area that consider structural domain knowledge typically also assume that such knowledge remains fixed along the system evolution (context-independent), and this might be too restrictive. Moreover, the information model of data-aware processes sometimes relies on relatively simple structures. This situation might cause an abstraction gap between the high-level conceptual view that business stakeholders have, and the low-level representation of information. When it comes to verification, taking into account all of the aspects above makes the problem more challenging. In this thesis, we investigate the verification of data-aware processes in the presence of ontologies while at the same time addressing all limitations above. Specifically, we provide the following contributions: (1) We propose a formal framework called Golog-KABs (GKABs), by leveraging on the state of the art formalisms for data-aware processes equipped with ontologies. GKABs enable us to specify semantically-rich data-aware business processes, where the system dynamics are specified using a high-level action language inspired by the Golog programming language. (2) We propose a parametric execution semantics for GKABs that is able to elegantly accommodate a plethora of inconsistency-aware semantics based on the well-known notion of repair, and this leads us to consider several variants of inconsistency-aware GKABs. (3) We enhance GKABs towards context-sensitive GKABs that take into account the contextual information during the system evolution. (4) We marry these two settings and introduce inconsistency-aware context-sensitive GKABs. (5) We introduce the so-called Alternating-GKABs that allow for a more fine-grained analysis over the evolution of inconsistency-aware context-sensitive systems. (6) In addition to GKABs, we introduce a novel framework called Semantically-Enhanced Data-Aware Processes (SEDAPs) that, by utilizing ontologies, enable us to have a high-level conceptual view over the evolution of the underlying system. We provide not only theoretical results, but have also implemented this concept of SEDAPs. We also provide numerous reductions for the verification of sophisticated first-order temporal properties over all of the settings above, and show that verification can be addressed using existing techniques developed for Data-Centric Dynamic Systems (which is a well-established data-aware processes framework), under suitable boundedness assumptions for the number of objects freshly introduced in the system while it evolves. Notably, all proposed GKAB extensions have no negative impact on computational complexity.

As melhores práticas de engenharia de software indicam que a atividade de verificação é fundamental para se alcançar o mínimo de qualidade na construção de um software. Nos processos de desenvolvimento baseados na UML, um dos seus focos principais é detectar inconsistências nos diagramas representativos do software. No entanto, a maioria desses processos, como o Iconix, aplica apenas técnicas informais (ex: inspeções visuais nos modelos), fazendo com que muitas vezes essa atividade seja negligenciada pelos desenvolvedores. Por outro lado, com o avanço das ferramentas automatizadas de verificação, os métodos formais, tais como o Event-B, estão atraindo cada vez mais a atenção das empresas de software. Porém, ainda é difícil convencer os desenvolvedores a adotá-los, pois não estão acostumados com os conceitos matemáticos envolvidos. Assim, este trabalho apresenta uma proposta de inclusão do Event-B no Iconix, dando origem ao BIconix, um processo de desenvolvimento orientado a objetos com suporte à verificação formal de inconsistências. Mais especificamente, esta tese aborda a tradução automática dos quatro diagramas existentes no Iconix (classes, casos de uso, robustez e sequência) para o Event-B, além de mostrar como esta formalização pode auxiliar na atividade de verificação em pontos específicos e bem definidos no processo proposto. / The best practices of software engineering indicate that the verification activity is essential to achieve some quality during the software construction. In UML-based development processes, one of its main focuses is the detection of inconsistencies in diagrams that represent the software. However, most of these processes, such as Iconix, apply only informal techniques (eg. visual model inspections), often implying the negligence of that activity by developers. Moreover, with the advance of automated verification tools, formal methods, such as Event-B, are increasingly attracting the attention of software companies. However, it is still difficult to convince developers to adopt them, because they are not acquainted with some mathematical concepts. Thus, this paper presents a proposal for the inclusion of Event-B within Iconix, giving rise to BIconix, an object-oriented development process that supports automatic inconsistencies formal verification. More specifically, this thesis addresses the translation of the four existing diagrams in Iconix (classes, use cases, robustness and sequence) to Event- B, and show how this formalization can assist the verification activity in well-defined check points of the proposed process.

As melhores práticas de engenharia de software indicam que a atividade de verificação é fundamental para se alcançar o mínimo de qualidade na construção de um software. Nos processos de desenvolvimento baseados na UML, um dos seus focos principais é detectar inconsistências nos diagramas representativos do software. No entanto, a maioria desses processos, como o Iconix, aplica apenas técnicas informais (ex: inspeções visuais nos modelos), fazendo com que muitas vezes essa atividade seja negligenciada pelos desenvolvedores. Por outro lado, com o avanço das ferramentas automatizadas de verificação, os métodos formais, tais como o Event-B, estão atraindo cada vez mais a atenção das empresas de software. Porém, ainda é difícil convencer os desenvolvedores a adotá-los, pois não estão acostumados com os conceitos matemáticos envolvidos. Assim, este trabalho apresenta uma proposta de inclusão do Event-B no Iconix, dando origem ao BIconix, um processo de desenvolvimento orientado a objetos com suporte à verificação formal de inconsistências. Mais especificamente, esta tese aborda a tradução automática dos quatro diagramas existentes no Iconix (classes, casos de uso, robustez e sequência) para o Event-B, além de mostrar como esta formalização pode auxiliar na atividade de verificação em pontos específicos e bem definidos no processo proposto. / The best practices of software engineering indicate that the verification activity is essential to achieve some quality during the software construction. In UML-based development processes, one of its main focuses is the detection of inconsistencies in diagrams that represent the software. However, most of these processes, such as Iconix, apply only informal techniques (eg. visual model inspections), often implying the negligence of that activity by developers. Moreover, with the advance of automated verification tools, formal methods, such as Event-B, are increasingly attracting the attention of software companies. However, it is still difficult to convince developers to adopt them, because they are not acquainted with some mathematical concepts. Thus, this paper presents a proposal for the inclusion of Event-B within Iconix, giving rise to BIconix, an object-oriented development process that supports automatic inconsistencies formal verification. More specifically, this thesis addresses the translation of the four existing diagrams in Iconix (classes, use cases, robustness and sequence) to Event- B, and show how this formalization can assist the verification activity in well-defined check points of the proposed process.

Organizations increasingly use communication as a strategic function to maneuver in a challenging, complex, and demanding social landscape. Based on assumptions of centralized control and planning, the strategic communication concept aims for coordination and consistency of communication. Implied is a view of actors as intentional, rational, and deliberate decision makers. Such a conventional view on strategic communication, however, cannot satisfactorily explain the underlying characteristics of communication practices in contemporary organizations. Nor does it explain how organizational members in their everyday work interpret and relate to such practices. This thesis adopts neo-institutional theory and the translation approach to study how strategic communication operates along an institutionalized recipe for communication that through various translations is reformulated to fit local organizational contexts and preferences of the people occupying these contexts. To illustrate the process of both following and adapting the institutionalized recipe of strategic communication, qualitative and quantitative material on the role of social media in sixteen Swedish universities are examined. The material is generated and gathered through an ethnographically inspired approach and includes: interviews, a six-month observation period, the study of documents, and a content analysis of Vice-Chancellor blogs. The findings show that work with social media is pervaded with inconsistencies and contradictions, but simultaneously relating to a shared recipe for communication. Shared elements for communication at the universities include the purposes for communication, notion of one university and integration. However, in translations people rely on local organizational conditions, personal values, ambitions, and experiences. This produces tensions between: control and independence, centralization and decentralization, and one voice and multiple voices. The findings suggest that translations differ across universities and between communicators on different levels, some being more “true” to the recipe than others. Thus, differences are inevitable, underscoring the issues of managing and controlling communication in the conventional approach of strategic communication. As a result, the empirical and theoretical concept of strategic communication benefits from acknowledging its social embeddedness and local recontextualization. Strategic communication is like dancing to music. Everyone hears the music, but the dance varies with each dancer ́s experiences, ambitions, and opportunities. / Strategiska universitet på kunskapens marknad?

The meet up between data, processes and structural knowledge in modeling complex enterprise systems is a challenging task that has led to the study of combining formalisms from knowledge representation, database theory, and process management. Moreover, to ensure system correctness, formal verification also comes into play as a promising approach that offers well-established techniques. In line with this, significant results have been obtained within the research on data-aware business processes, which studies the marriage between static and dynamic aspects of a system within a unified framework. However, several limitations are still present. Various formalisms for data-aware processes that have been studied typically use a simple mechanism for specifying the system dynamics. The majority of works also assume a rather simple treatment of inconsistency (i.e., reject inconsistent system states). Many researches in this area that consider structural domain knowledge typically also assume that such knowledge remains fixed along the system evolution (context-independent), and this might be too restrictive. Moreover, the information model of data-aware processes sometimes relies on relatively simple structures. This situation might cause an abstraction gap between the high-level conceptual view that business stakeholders have, and the low-level representation of information. When it comes to verification, taking into account all of the aspects above makes the problem more challenging. In this thesis, we investigate the verification of data-aware processes in the presence of ontologies while at the same time addressing all limitations above. Specifically, we provide the following contributions: (1) We propose a formal framework called Golog-KABs (GKABs), by leveraging on the state of the art formalisms for data-aware processes equipped with ontologies. GKABs enable us to specify semantically-rich data-aware business processes, where the system dynamics are specified using a high-level action language inspired by the Golog programming language. (2) We propose a parametric execution semantics for GKABs that is able to elegantly accommodate a plethora of inconsistency-aware semantics based on the well-known notion of repair, and this leads us to consider several variants of inconsistency-aware GKABs. (3) We enhance GKABs towards context-sensitive GKABs that take into account the contextual information during the system evolution. (4) We marry these two settings and introduce inconsistency-aware context-sensitive GKABs. (5) We introduce the so-called Alternating-GKABs that allow for a more fine-grained analysis over the evolution of inconsistency-aware context-sensitive systems. (6) In addition to GKABs, we introduce a novel framework called Semantically-Enhanced Data-Aware Processes (SEDAPs) that, by utilizing ontologies, enable us to have a high-level conceptual view over the evolution of the underlying system. We provide not only theoretical results, but have also implemented this concept of SEDAPs. We also provide numerous reductions for the verification of sophisticated first-order temporal properties over all of the settings above, and show that verification can be addressed using existing techniques developed for Data-Centric Dynamic Systems (which is a well-established data-aware processes framework), under suitable boundedness assumptions for the number of objects freshly introduced in the system while it evolves. Notably, all proposed GKAB extensions have no negative impact on computational complexity.

Structured overlay networks form a major classof peer-to-peer systems, which are touted for their abilitiesto scale, tolerate failures, and self-manage. Any long livedInternet-scale distributed system is destined to facenetwork partitions. Although the problem of network partitionsand mergers is highly related to fault-tolerance andself-management in large-scale systems, it has hardly beenstudied in the context of structured peer-to-peer systems.These systems have mainly been studied under churn (frequentjoins/failures), which as a side effect solves the problemof network partitions, as it is similar to massive nodefailures. Yet, the crucial aspect of network mergers has beenignored. In fact, it has been claimed that ring-based structuredoverlay networks, which constitute the majority of thestructured overlays, are intrinsically ill-suited for mergingrings. In this thesis, we present a number of research papers representing our work on handling network partitions and mergers in structured overlay networks. The contribution of this thesis is threefold. First, we provide a solution for merging ring-based structured overlays. Our solution is tuneable, by a {\em fanout} parameter, to achieve a trade-off between message and time complexity. Second, we provide a network size estimation algorithm for ring-based structured overlays. We believe that an estimate of the current network size can be used for tuning overlay parameters that change according to the network size, for instance the fanout parameter in our merger solution.Third, we extend our work from fixing routing anomalies to achieving data consistency. We argue that decreasing lookup inconsistencies on the routing level aids in achieving data consistency in applications built on top of overlays. We study the frequency of occurence of lookup inconsistencies and discuss solutions to decrease the affect of lookup inconsistencies.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / Organizational cynicism is an attitude, characterized by frustration and negatively valenced beliefs, resulting primarily from unmet expectations, which is capable of being directed towards an organization in general and/or more specific facets of the organizational environment (Brockway, Carlson, Jones, & Bryant, 2002). This thesis presents an exploratory study into the causes of organizational cynicism at the United States Naval Academy. The study is based on focus groups involving 30 first class midshipmen (i.e., seniors). Gaps in expectations versus students' reality emerged as a cause of organizational cynicism. Themes such as (1) constraints on decision-making discretion, (2) disappointment in peers' actions, (3) organizational inconsistencies, and (4) emphasis on outside interests versus midshipmen's interests emerged as the strongest precursors to the development of cynicism. The effects of organizational cynicism were reported as (1) lack of organizational commitment and citizenship and (2) deficiencies in decision-making and risk taking skills. / Lieutenant, United States Navy

Government intervention in the financial and social affairs of citizens has increased dramatically in the last fifty years. As a result, government administrative decisions continually affect the everyday lives of people. Many of these decisions are discretionary. Modern administrative law has grown to meet the need for governments, rather than the courts, to supervise the exercise of administrative power so that injustice resulting from misuse of power can be avoided. The merits review system is an integral part of this administrative law. The effectiveness of the merits review system is dependent upon how Parliament makes provision for merits review in the legislative process. The object of this thesis is to analyse and evaluate the effectiveness of the scope of the Commonwealth administrative law merits review system. An evaluation of the availability of rights of review of the merits of Commonwealth administrative decisions will determine the extent to which Commonwealth law provides for merits review of administrative decisions. This thesis makes such an evaluation by undertaking an empirical study of the merits review provisions in Commonwealth legislation. The empirical study analyses 1,070 Commonwealth statutes and establishes that there are 340 statutes that confer power to make a reviewable decision or decisions. However, only 30 percent of these statutes provide for merits review of all reviewable decisions, while 44 percent provide for merits review of some decisions and 26 percent do not provide for merits review of any decisions. Consequently, the empirical study identifies inconsistencies in the provision of merits review of Commonwealth administrative decisions. The Australian parliamentary executive system of government has permitted a breakdown in the legislative drafting process that has allowed these inconsistencies to develop. Moreover, the executive arm of the Commonwealth government has diminished its accountability to Parliament for some of the administrative decisions made by it. A person affected by an unreviewable administrative decision may be treated unjustly as a result.

Government intervention in the financial and social affairs of citizens has increased dramatically in the last fifty years. As a result, government administrative decisions continually affect the everyday lives of people. Many of these decisions are discretionary. Modern administrative law has grown to meet the need for governments, rather than the courts, to supervise the exercise of administrative power so that injustice resulting from misuse of power can be avoided. The merits review system is an integral part of this administrative law. The effectiveness of the merits review system is dependent upon how Parliament makes provision for merits review in the legislative process. The object of this thesis is to analyse and evaluate the effectiveness of the scope of the Commonwealth administrative law merits review system. An evaluation of the availability of rights of review of the merits of Commonwealth administrative decisions will determine the extent to which Commonwealth law provides for merits review of administrative decisions. This thesis makes such an evaluation by undertaking an empirical study of the merits review provisions in Commonwealth legislation. The empirical study analyses 1,070 Commonwealth statutes and establishes that there are 340 statutes that confer power to make a reviewable decision or decisions. However, only 30 percent of these statutes provide for merits review of all reviewable decisions, while 44 percent provide for merits review of some decisions and 26 percent do not provide for merits review of any decisions. Consequently, the empirical study identifies inconsistencies in the provision of merits review of Commonwealth administrative decisions. The Australian parliamentary executive system of government has permitted a breakdown in the legislative drafting process that has allowed these inconsistencies to develop. Moreover, the executive arm of the Commonwealth government has diminished its accountability to Parliament for some of the administrative decisions made by it. A person affected by an unreviewable administrative decision may be treated unjustly as a result.

Government intervention in the financial and social affairs of citizens has increased dramatically in the last fifty years. As a result, government administrative decisions continually affect the everyday lives of people. Many of these decisions are discretionary. Modern administrative law has grown to meet the need for governments, rather than the courts, to supervise the exercise of administrative power so that injustice resulting from misuse of power can be avoided. The merits review system is an integral part of this administrative law. The effectiveness of the merits review system is dependent upon how Parliament makes provision for merits review in the legislative process. The object of this thesis is to analyse and evaluate the effectiveness of the scope of the Commonwealth administrative law merits review system. An evaluation of the availability of rights of review of the merits of Commonwealth administrative decisions will determine the extent to which Commonwealth law provides for merits review of administrative decisions. This thesis makes such an evaluation by undertaking an empirical study of the merits review provisions in Commonwealth legislation. The empirical study analyses 1,070 Commonwealth statutes and establishes that there are 340 statutes that confer power to make a reviewable decision or decisions. However, only 30 percent of these statutes provide for merits review of all reviewable decisions, while 44 percent provide for merits review of some decisions and 26 percent do not provide for merits review of any decisions. Consequently, the empirical study identifies inconsistencies in the provision of merits review of Commonwealth administrative decisions. The Australian parliamentary executive system of government has permitted a breakdown in the legislative drafting process that has allowed these inconsistencies to develop. Moreover, the executive arm of the Commonwealth government has diminished its accountability to Parliament for some of the administrative decisions made by it. A person affected by an unreviewable administrative decision may be treated unjustly as a result.