Note:  This thesis is a technical topic intended for students with an interest in coding and software.

Initial Situation:

The subject-oriented process modeling language PASS is an interesting yet not widely adopted tool for modeling processes in the context of IT systems. It follows the interesting yet also not widely adopted paradigm of subject-orientation that brings a unique perspective to thinking, understanding and modeling processes.

 

To allow the small community of SO practitioners to more easily exchange models there exists an exchange standard for PASS process models, making use of the so-called semantic web technologies in the form of the language OWL/RDF.

Furthermore, to easily programmatically handle process models in the OWL/RDF format without having to worry about the technical challenges coming with OWL/RDF, there do exist community-created libraries in C# and Java in the form of the alps.net.api and alps.java.api.

Yet in practical application, those libraries have proven to be not perfect.

Goal:

General Research Goal of this topic is to: analyse, test and potentially refactor those libraries and make them more robust.

 

Research questions:

1. Are those libraries working as intended?
2. Are there potential improvements in software technologies that could be made to advance the intended purpose?
3. How can potential bugs and limits be found and possibly be fixed?

 

Necessary task involve:

1.  Understanding the PASS and the exchange OWL format. 
2. Understanding the existing software architecture of alps.net.api and alps.java.api (and the libraries they are using)?
3. Create a testing concept to make sure they work as intended (for process model creation, import and export
4.  Potentially create and report on improvements and found limitations