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Applying architecture implies that it provides added value across an enterprise. Although widely adopted, this claim has only been scarcely investigated, not to mention quantified. This document describes the results of a case study to quantify the effects of applying Enterprise Architecture within a financial institution called FinCom. For confidential information reasons, the name of this company is fictive. The thesis attempts to capture several factors at project level with respect to the application of Enterprise Architecture and its subsequent financial benefits. The study analyzed 40 projects, with regard to time and budget overrun. In order to collect these data, a total of 35 business, enterprise and domain architects were interviewed on their experience with these projects. Among factors taken into account were architecture type, project compliance to architecture and experience of the architect. Consequently, these factors are recorded in hypotheses that relate to the budget and time figures of the project. These hypotheses are incorporated in the 'Architecture Effectiveness Model' and statistically tested with the acquired data. This led to more than 12.000 calculations to show the subsequent benefits of Enterprise Architecture.

DEMO is a methodology for designing and engineering organizations which is mostly used for Information System Development (ISD) and redesigning the business processes. DEMO has the ability to reduce the complexity of an organization by providing an ontological model of that organization. Although DEMO has promising advantages and has provided successful outcome in practice, it hasn’t received the deserved attention from The individuals in practical fields. While many of the competitor methodologies are more successful and accepted among the practitioners, DEMO is at the risk of being forgotten among all other methodologies in the methodology jungle. It seems trivial to use effective tactics to increase the acceptance of DEMO among individuals in practice. These tactics can only be effective if they take the reasons behind this specific point of view about DEMO into account. Various factors from a technical anomalies to opinion of others can influence the perception of people about a methodology. While the acceptance of DEMO by people in practice is very important in the success of the methodology in practical fields, no research was found in the literature that the statistics on reports the adoption rate of DEMO in practice and identifies the reasons behind certain adoption behavior. Therefore, alongside providing such statistics the main goal of this thesis is to identify the factors that can determine certain behavior towards DEMO and propose recommendations to increase the adoption of DEMO based on these factors. We conducted this research in three phases: Theoretical, Quantitative and qualitative analysis. In theoretical analysis we have identified the factors that were proven to influence the adoption of other methodologies. In quantitative analysis we have tried to find out whether these factors have any influence on the adoption of DEMO. At the end, we captured the actual experience of the individuals in practice with DEMO. In this research we were able to identify several factors that influence the adoption of DEMO. We realized that the support of DEMO by management, coworkers, other individuals with the same skills as the individual and the eagerness of the individual to keep him self updated about DEMO can increase the adoption of DEMO to a great extent. Furthermore, uncertainty one’s position in the organization has a negative effect on the adoption of DEMO. Finally, the ability of the methodology to produce results in a way that can be communicated with all the individuals with different levels of knowledge about DEMO is also influencing the adoption of DEMO.

The software development has changed dramatically the last two decades. Software was primarily built in house 30 years ago, aiming to fit the needs of a specific user. During the 80’s the tendency changed with the foundation of software houses that were specializing in the development of “off the self” software, fitting the needs of a wider group of users, thus achieving scale economy, cheaper software with better quality. The last years, the explosion of the internet usage has transferred all applications to the “cloud” exploiting the faster and cheaper than ever hardware and netware. Furthermore, software systems such as Content Management Systems and Enterprise Resource Planning have transformed information system development into a process that connects the right components of functionality together. However, no matter what the advances are, tailored software is still required. Organizations, like businesses and institutions, with a variety in characteristics like delivered services, size, people, business processes and operating rules will always have a need for a customized system that fits their needs. Thus, building software has become more complex not in terms of available technological solutions but in terms of determining user needs. There are still excellent flawless software systems that solve the wrong problem. Therefore, enriching software engineering processes with business modeling techniques has been one way to cope with this problem. One of the most famous software engineering processes is the Rational Unified Process (RUP) which includes its own business modeling technique. In this thesis we try to combine DEMO and RUP in order to exploit the advantages of both methodologies which will ultimately assist practitioners in the development of quality software that solves the right problem. Our effort starts with the identification of a common scientific background, continues with devising a framework of assisting the combination and study of the methodologies. Then, the combined methodology is used in a case study in order to test in practice the new methodology.

Nowadays large organizations are confronted with the increasing complex network of processes, information flows and stakeholders which all should be managed to provide the customer with end products and services. In a utopia, every actor in an organization would be able to have an overview of his area of concern. Management would have a precise high level overview of all the business processes and their interaction with the information they manipulate through applications. They would exactly know which processes and actors are affected by a business decision. The operational employee would exactly know how the decisions he makes influence the organization as a whole. Unfortunately, misalignment is the biggest challenge of current organizations. The Rijkswaterstaat is no exception. To cope with the complexity the Enterprise Architecture and Consultancy (EAC) team of the RWS has adapted the RWS Enterprise Architecture Framework (RWS-EAF) as blueprint to structure the organization. This methodology combines the Integrated Architecture framework (IAF, which is the result of years of practical experience of Capgemini) with the DEMO methodology, a scientifically founded method for modeling the essence of an organization. The RWS-EA framework has already proven its value. During the Application Portfolio Rationalization project, the DEMO based business architecture has been linked to the applications used within the RWS. Still it proves to be a challenge to maintain a synergy within the enterprise architecture framework. As a result, the alignment between the business and the application/IT infrastructure is less than optimal. The thesis’s objective is to improve this connection by elaborating on an essential transitional stage in between; the Information Architecture. The products in the RWS-EA are analyzed by positioning them in a DEMO perspective. An assessment framework created during research is consulted to qualify the current Information Architecture of the RWS. To further synchronize the RWS organization, UPP process models created by Beheersorganisatie Processen en Systemen (BPS) of the RWS are included by using a methodology adopted from previous research. A DEMO based methodology which allows development of products for the Business, Information and Application organization is demonstrated with the use of a case study. The most notable models are the Process Structure Diagrams (PSD) which satisfies the DEMO-3 specification and the Natural BID models which are based upon a proposal of the EAC team. The cross relationship between the products and their place within the RWS-EAF are depicted. The proposed design of the Information Architecture is qualified to the assessment framework. Some final thoughts are given about the methodology as developed, the integration in the architectural tools and the possibilities for further improvement in future iterations.

The lack of methodology has proven to be a weakness in many sourcing initiatives. This research is an attempt to rationalize the decisions decision-makers often intuitively make. The following question is addressed in this research: How can one decide which domains in an enterprise are favorable candidates for sourcing? To this end, the concept of a domain that is useful for sourcing decision-making is introduced, as well as a system to assign a score for favorability for sourcing to a domain. Furthermore, criteria for sourcing are uncovered, and ordered based on their distinguishing power and level of difficulty of checking. On the basis of this ordering, a stepwise decision-making model is introduced, which provides a relatively quick way of determining the favorability of a domain for sourcing.

Video support is becoming an indispensable tool in tennis practice sessions, especially at the professional level. Cameras are used to record a player and the current available software is used optimize the player's tennis technique, i.e. the biomechanics. Unfortunately, the tactical side of tennis is underexposed in terms of available software. Tennis can be seen as a spatial-temporal game. The the dimensions of the court are fixed and the ball goes from player a to player b in a finite amount of time. The work presented in this thesis shows a method to exibly evaluate a tennis game based on the footage of a single mounted camera. Software is used to extract spatial-temporal data from the tennis footage and a spatial-temporal language based on first order logic is designed to query the spatial-temporal data. The implemented prototype of this thesis' work provides a graphical user interface in which the user is able to execute queries and to see the movie fragments that meet the requirements of the spatial-temporal query.

Organizers of STRP Art and Technology Festival want to enhance the festival experience of visitors whilst also learning more about these visitors. The proposed solution is a tag-based recommender system, where the feedback received from visitors will allow STRP to learn more about how visitors perceive art pieces and in turn provide visitors with recommendations of other art pieces to view, at the festival. During the course of this thesis, we first explore how we can learn about the preferences of visitors using the tags they contribute, paired with a rating for the art piece. We do this by investigating a semantic mapping tool, Relco from TU Eindhoven, which enables us to map tags to concepts from a vocabulary, with the help of a lexical ontology such as WordNet. We experiment with the stemming of tags before using them in string matching algorithms. Further, we investigate how influential the vocabulary is onto which we map tags, when using Relco. Finally, we evaluate recommendation algorithms. We explore collaborative, content-based and hybrid forms of recommendations. We conclude that, in this context, content-based recommendation algorithms perform the most accurately and consistently. We also conclude that the semantic extension in a tag-based recommendation algorithm enables us to accurately profile a visitor and art piece with a finite number of concepts.

An increasing amount of datasets that can be combined with other datasets is emerging. Particularly the SemanticWeb allows creating links between datasets, which increase the value of the dataset that is being linked. Finding links between datasets, as well as capturing the data inside another dataset that is of interest is a process for which tools have yet to be perfected. Often the process of enriching data involves understanding how to access the data, and finding clues how to use auxiliary data to add value to the original dataset. This Thesis document proposes a framework for visually specifying the enrichment of RDF data. The framework is called RDF Gears, and allows incremental enrichment of RDF datasets. The platform provides functionality for composing enrichment flows from individual enrichment steps. The enrichment flow describes the order in which RDF data will be gathered from remote RDF datasources. After specifying the flow, the enrichments can be applied to the RDF dataset. RDF Gears also provides functionality for creating and reusing enrichment steps and (nested) flows. The approach discussed in this document shows the potential of specifying RDF enrichments incrementally. Also the possibility for abstracting Semantic Web technologies using the visual programming paradigm is shown. The main deliverable of this Master Thesis is the RDF Gears framework.

After its founding 15 years ago, Tam Tam has encountered the limits of legacy systems used for the internal processes in recent years. To overcome these limits, multiple efforts have been made to enforce a transition to specific Enterprise Application Integration styles. Although the efforts resulted in working application interactions, the desire for an organized whole sustained. The motivation for this thesis project was to make one final effort towards a new architecture by providing a carte blanche for all steps to be taken as well as their outcomes. The main goal of this thesis project was to research the most logical „next step‟ for Tam Tam to take with the internal systems architecture and to derive which improvements this step brings into the picture. To reach this goal, a crossroad of three key elements is identified. 1. Context, the first element is to figure out what the current architectural landscape looks like and what can be learned from the previous attempts at integrating the systems. 2. Theory, the second element is to figure out how architectures can be compared, what the possible solutions are and which of those fits Tam Tam best. 3. Practice, the third element is to link the theoretical design to the practice to assess its feasibility, to evaluate which improvements for Tam Tam are introduced and, finally, to evaluate the chosen methodology. The choice for sub-steps in the chosen methodology is based on best practices and guidelines from available (relevant) literature and is adapted to be used in this specific context. The focus of this adaption is that the chosen steps must be adaptable to other contexts too. After the complete methodology has been carried out, the key deliverables can be divided into two different categories: science and Tam Tam. For science the main deliverables are: 1. An aggregated list of re-usable insights 2. A case study for an Enterprise Service Bus transition 3. Are-usable step-by-step approach from legacy systems architecture towards the „most logical‟ next architecture. The key deliverables for Tam Tam entail: A. A conclusion of the continuous effort towards Enterprise Application Integration B. Sellable BizTalk know-how C. An improved internal architecture with regard to flexibility, maintainability and adaptability Concluding, the given carte blanche allowed for a successful path towards the best fitting Enterprise Application Integration style for Tam Tam. Furthermore, the methodology used is assembled in such a way it can withstand usage in other contexts and can be seen as a first step towards a formal definition of said methodology. This re- usability is introduced by the context-free focus during the definition of said methodology.

Information technology is the common denominator for all the industries in the 21st century, therefore any important change in this area is prone to have an impact on small and large businesses alike. The latest shock wave storming through IT is Cloud computing. Due to the importance and sensitive nature of applications used by financial institutions, the main goal of this research is to investigate how Cloud computing could change the way services are provided to customers and what is the emerging role of IT consultancy companies for this specific market segment. In order to do so, a proposed reference architecture has been created based on existing models and services in combination with the opinion of various experts from Capgemini and financial institutions. The impact of the proposed model, "Capgemini Immediate for Financial Institutions", has been expressed from a business and an IT perspective. Also, its functionality has been showcased in a scenario meant to underline the impact of the proposed changes on the boundaries of the system and the interaction of the financial institution with other entities. This process has been evaluated and supervised by experts from Capgemini in order to meet the standards used in the industry.

The documentation process at Staatsolie refinery concerning the Test and Inspection turnaround (T&I), has many shortcomings. This fact has led to many problems during the T&I, a process that has a strict timeline and schedule that is very work intensive. During a T&I turnaround which takes place every 4 years, the plant at Staatsolie refinery is shut down. This costs money, because normal work is ceased. The fact that the documentation process has many shortcomings is therefore a crucial problem, because it has contributed to many documents not being created or documents gone missing. It has also contributed to the T&I getting behind schedule, which is a loss of money for Staatsolie. Furthermore it has hindered the creation of reports that need to be archived and accessible for at least 2 years. What the T&I turnaround requires is the ability to manage, store and share the documents acquired during the turnaround in a fast and reliable way. This can be achieved by using an information system, more specifically an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS). Such a system should allow users to store, access and modify information quickly and easily. The aim of this thesis is to select an EDMS for the T&I turnaround. This EDMS should allow users to store, access and modify information quickly and easily, and thus aid in keeping to the T&I schedule. It should also thoroughly remove the problem of missing documents or documents not being created. The start point of this thesis is an analysis of the T&I organization and the documents involved in the processes, to get a general idea of the working methodologies and deficiencies of the current system. These findings will then be used to set up a thorough requirements specification for a selection of an EDMS for the T&I turnaround. After the analysis has been made, this report will go on to evaluate and select the right tool for use at the refinery of Staatsolie. This evaluation and selection process is conducted using a basic information framework for EDM systems. For this evaluation, the output from the analysis is used to create an official Request for Proposal (RFP). This RFP is then sent out to multiple vendors. The vendors that reply are then tested against the selection criteria that were created by the project group at Staatsolie. Finally, a tool is selected and this vendor will then further design and implement this system for an effective Document Management System for the Test and Inspection turnaround.

The government of Suriname, like any other government of development countries, copes with a number of limitations. Among others, the government lacks of IT policies and IT awareness. The challenge for the Suriname government, and therefore the Ministry of Finance, is to obtain means by which IT policy and IT decisions are steered in a structured way. The main interest should be the acquisition of business and IT integration and the ability to control strategic changes within the organization. The Generic System Development Process (GSDP)s is a relatively new approach on the development of systems. It focuses on business and organizational aspects of an organization as well as on the design and engineering process of developing target systems. In addition, the GSDP provides a sound definition for relevant aspects of the complete development process and an overview of relations between these aspects. The objective of thesis project is to develop a well-founded framework for assessing IT systems by the Suriname Ministry of Finance. The result is an assessment framework based on the Generic System Development Process. The assessment framework consists of an ontological and implementation model of the organization and a functional model of existing IT systems. The Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) is used for implementing the ontological model. The theoretical foundation of this methodology is used for defining tables for expressing the implementation model of the organization and the functional model of existing IT systems. The functional model consists of consistency tables, which contains integrated information of an organization and the supporting IT system. These tables open discussion and form the base for a proper assessment of existing IT systems.

This master thesis presents an empirical system architecting process, which addresses the system performance of multi-tier information systems in an enterprise environment. The process is demonstrated by a real practical architecting project as a case study. Such an architecting process begins from performance requirement analysis and ends with sizing the physical system components. Queuing analysis will be discussed as a science foundation and its application will be described as a key step in addressing the system performance in the system architecting process.

The publication of Linked datasets on the Linked Open Data cloud has been increasing. Only very few of these datasets are interlinked with each other. Lots of tools have been developed for making interlinking between linked datasets. Silk-A Link Discovery Framework is a tool that allows one to do interlinking between data items within different Linked Data sources. The Silk Linking Specification Language (Silk-LSL) allows the user to write a script for specifying conditions that need to be met in order for resource to be interlinked. The Silk- LSL file can be either written by manually or generated with the help of tools. The manual approach requires skilled users and hard work for manually discovering the classes and classes’ properties of the datasets that need to be interlinked. Hence, an automatic approach for solving this problem is needed. This thesis document proposes an application which guides the users through the process of specifying linking conditions during the creation of the Silk LSL program. The tool is called Silk Magic, and helps users in the process of creating an LSL file. The application provides various features for editing linking conditions. These features provide an interactive tree view for specifying the linking conditions that are required in order to generate the file. The Silk Magic application with its three main features: Similarity functions editor, Query Builder editor and Path Expression editor are the main contributions of this Master Thesis.

This thesis proposes a process including deliverables based on Design for Six Sgima to be used in predevelopment which is supported by a Product Lifecycle Management System.

Conventional search techniques are limited at solving complex queries because they work on the basis of word computations and link analysis. Semantic search promises to extend the paradigm of traditional IR from mere document retrieval to entity and knowledge retrieval by looking at the meaning of words. This MSc-thesis proposes a semantic annotation system capable of discovering var- ious event-related entity types in articles on the web. The system will annotate these entity types with metadata linking them to instances stored in a semantic repository and link with their respective ontological class. Such annotation sys- tem can then further be used as a basis for developing a semantic search engine or other intelligent applications.

This thesis is aimed at exploring how security aspects within organizations can be addressed at a very high level: an ontological level that encapsulates construction and operation issues of organizations with no reference to implementation concerns. To do this, DEMO (Dynamic Engineering and Modeling for Organizations) has been found as the relevant methodology to use. The thesis has mainly four contributions. (1) First, it identifies the thread that connects DEMO with security. It does that by performing a thorough study of information systems security issues and DEMO. The research brings forward the current state in the information systems security field and concludes by pointing out the connection between DEMO and security - responsibility. (2) Second, based on the results of the previous investigation, it analyses various approaches to model security starting from responsibility with emphasis on their strengths, week points, similarities and differences. (3) Third, it performs a critical analysis of DEMO from a security perspective. The findings are analyzed and discussed and DEMO’s approach to responsibility is compared with the previous analyzed security modeling approaches based on responsibility. The results of this comparison constitute the (4) fourth contribution of the thesis: a starting point for modeling security within DEMO. Two case studies will be used for illustration purposes of the proposed method.

The ageing electricity grid cannot sustain the growth in electricity demand for much longer without renewing the current way of working. This thesis proposes a new way by introducing smart-grid and complex event processing for the management of the smart grid.

This report describes the design and development of a dashboard that visualizes OnLine Analytical Processing information. Users are able to navigate through the information using touch-based gestures. The source of the information is a Customer Relationship Management tool. This information is made accessible using a Data Warehouse and a Data Mart. Before the design and implementation of the dashboard was started a few other steps were required. The first step in this process was to map out the situation at the start as well as the information needs of the end user. The design of the dashboard, comprised of a visualization and set of gesture interactions, is based on the information needs of the end user. The design was implemented using standardized web technologies. This approach has resulted in a web application usable on mobile as well as desktop devices with touchscreens. Finally an end user validation of the system was performed to determine whether the application fulfills the needs determined at the beginning. Testing with the dashboard revealed that there were a few points on which the dashboard can be improved. Users want to explore the information with more detail. Another point is that the users required more axes to fulfill their information need. Users found the system easy to work with and the dashboard invited them to explore the information.

Coaches are using video analysis to evaluate the performance of a team in field hockey. Events with the ball are tagged and saved in a match annotation file, which is used to lookup video fragments. The match annotation enables a coach to lookup and to evaluate single moments of the match but doesn't provide a coach insight in the tactic. Tactic doesn't relate to single event but to a sequence of events. Currently it is not possible to evaluate the tactic. Because the match annotation contains information about the events, which includes the time and the location it is spatial-temporal dataset. To lookup a tactical pattern a coach it is required to express a tactical pattern on the spatial-temporal dataset. To enable a coach to incorporate his view of the game the flexibility is important. In this thesis work a system is designed which enables a coach to evaluate tactic by enabling him to express a tactical pattern and by visualizing the results. A prototype of the system is implemented to evaluate the design of the system. Coaches active at the top national and international level provided input for the system and participated in the evaluation of the prototype. The designed system provides a useful method to evaluate tactics by a coach. The system enables the expression of a tactical pattern by a coach in a flexible manner. This thesis presents the requirements for a system to analyze tactics. It also presents an approach to model and express a tactical pattern using a domain specific language. To create a tactical pattern a visual query interface is presented. The visual interface also offers the possibility to interpret the result of a query.