UGENT VUB Alliance Research Group in Information Systems

The main goal for the construction of this alliance research group is establishing an official research unit in which the current joint research activities can be maintained and extended. In this context two common research themes are distinguished: ontology-driven requirements engineering and business process integration. Ontology-driven requirements engineering: Over the years Prof. Poels and his team have gained expertise in the conceptual modeling subfield of requirements engineering (e.g., goal modeling, business process modeling, domain-specific modeling). By combining this knowledge with the ontology and ontology engineering knowledge of the VUB team, we plan to investigate in detail the role of ontologies in the requirements engineering process. More specific we plan to develop methods which facilitate the use of ontologies in order to improve the reuse of domain knowledge during the modeling process and consequently improve the quality of the developed models. The proposed methods, modeling languages and models will be evaluated empirically using both business cases and experiments. The creation of this alliance research group must make it easier to find appropriate businesses cases using the Solvay business school network. The research alliance can also further extend the group of possible participants for the experiments. Having groups of students at two universities makes it possible to increase the frequency of conducting experiments and also use one of the groups as a pre-test for the design of an experiment. Business process integration: Nowadays enterprises act in a very volatile environment where they need to be able to integrate their business processes with their partners very quickly. In this research topic we investigate how this business process integration is managed using two different approaches. On the one hand a pragmatic approach is followed which looks at how integration of information systems actually occurs using process mining techniques that integrate the logs of the information systems of two different businesses. On the other hand this research topic also investigates how shared business ontologies can be used for integrating business processes. The two research groups are also connected by the type of Information Systems (IS) research that is conducted at both entities. More specific both groups focus on design science research which emphasizes a construction-oriented view of IS research centered around designing and building innovative IT artifacts which make both theoretical contributions and assist in solving the current and anticipated problems of practitioners. We believe that the experience with former design science projects at both universities, is essential for the development and evaluation of the new IT artifacts intended by the identified common research themes.