Semiotics, the science of signs, has long been recognised as an important discipline for understanding information and communications. Moreover it has found wide application in other areas of computer science, as it offers an effective insight into organisations and the computer systems that support them. An organisation may be viewed as a system of information and communication in which human actors, with the assistance of information technology, are able to process, represent, store and consume information. Computer systems that fit into an organisation and that support and enhance its performance and competitiveness, can be better delivered if semiotic principles are understood and applied. In this book, first published in 2000, semiotic methods are introduced and illustrated through three major case studies, which demonstrate how information systems can be developed to meet business requirements and support business objectives. It will appeal to academics, systems developers and analysts.

A theory of HCI that uses concepts from semiotics and computer science to focus on the communication between designers and users during interaction. In The Semiotic Engineering of Human-Computer Interaction, Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza proposes an account of HCI that draws on concepts from semiotics and computer science to investigate the relationship between user and designer. Semiotics is the study of signs, and the essence of semiotic engineering is the communication between designers and users at interaction time; designers must somehow be present in the interface to tell users how to use the signs that make up a system or program. This approach, which builds on--but goes further than--the currently dominant user-centered approach, allows designers to communicate their overall vision and therefore helps users understand designs--rather than simply which icon to click. According to de Souza's account, both designers and users are interlocutors in an overall communication process that takes place through an interface of words, graphics, and behavior. Designers must tell users what they mean by the artifact they have created, and users must understand and respond to what they are being told. By coupling semiotic theory and engineering, de Souza's approach to HCI design encompasses the principles, the materials, the processes, and the possibilities for producing meaningful interactive computer system discourse and achieves a broader perspective than cognitive, ethnographic, or ergonomic approaches. De Souza begins with a theoretical overview and detailed exposition of the semiotic engineering account of HCI. She then shows how this approach can be applied specifically to HCI evaluation and design of online help systems, customization and end-user programming, and multiuser applications. Finally, she reflects on the potential and opportunities for research in semiotic engineering.

Drawing meaningful conclusions from organisational data is challenging, and theoretical frameworks can often illuminate information in fresh and useful ways. This book is one of the first to demonstrate how organisational semiotics can be applied to business informatics and information systems. Semiotics, a long-established discipline of signs, offers a rich philosophical and theoretical foundation for understanding information systems. This book demonstrates how applying the framework of semiotics to an organisation can provide insights into its communication needs, and as a result, enhance the design of its information system. The authors demonstrate how organisations collect, process, represent, store and consume information through a complex system which is aligned to support its objectives and enhance performance. Organisational Semiotics for Business Informatics clearly introduces the basic principles and describes a set of methods and techniques rooted in organisational semiotics. These have been applied to business applications; demonstrated through real life case studies. This ground-breaking book has the potential to transform the theoretical understanding of information systems into the basis of a scientific discipline.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE 2011, held in London, UK, in June 2011. The 42 revised full papers and 5 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 320 submissions. In addition the book contains the abstracts of 2 keynote speeches. The contributions are organized in topical sections on requirements; adaptation and evolution; model transformation; conceptual design; domain specific languages; case studies and experiences; mining and matching; business process modelling; validation and quality; and service and management.

Modern society has been transformed by the digital convergence towards a future where technologies embed themselves into the fabric of everyday life. This ongoing merging of social and technological infrastructures provides and necessitates new possibilities to renovate past notions, models and methods of information systems development that accommodates humans as actors within the infrastructure. This shift introduces new possibilities for information systems designers to fulfil more and more everyday functions, and to enhance their value and worth to the user. Reframing Humans in Information Systems Development aims to reframe the phenomenon of human-centered development of information systems by connecting scientific constructs produced within the field of information systems which has recently provided a plethora of multidisciplinary user views, without explicitly defining clear constructs that serve the IS field in particular. IS researchers, practitioners and students would benefit from Reframing Humans in Information Systems Development as the book provides a comprehensive view to various human-centered development methods and approaches. The representatives of the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Supported Collaborative Work will also find this book an excellent resource. A theoretical handbook and collection of practical experiences, are included along with critical discussions of the utilization methods in ISD and their implications with some interconnecting commentary viewpoints.

This book contains substantially extended and revised versions of the best papers from the 15th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, ICEIS 2013, held in Angers, France, in July 2013. The 29 full and two invited papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 321 submissions. They reflect state-of-the-art research focusing mainly on real-world applications and highlight the benefits of information systems and technology for industry and services, thus connecting academia with the world of real enterprises. The topics covered are: databases and information systems integration, artificial intelligence and decision support systems, information systems analysis and specification, software agents and Internet computing, human–computer interaction, and enterprise architecture.

This book brings together enterprise modeling and software specification, providing a conceptual background and methodological guidelines that concern the design of enterprise information systems. In this, two corresponding disciplines (enterprise engineering and software engineering) are considered in a complementary way. This is how the widely recognized gap between domain experts and software engineers could be effectively addressed. The content is, on the one hand, based on a conceptual invariance (embracing concepts whose essence transcends the barriers between social and technical disciplines) while on the other, the book is featuring a modeling duality, by bringing together social theories (that are underlying with regard to enterprise engineering) and computing paradigms (that are underlying as it concerns software engineering). In addition, the proposed approach as well as its guidelines and related notations further foster such enterprise-software modeling, by facilitating modeling generations and transformations. Considering unstructured business information in the beginning, the modeling process would progress through the methodological construction of enterprise models, to reach as far as a corresponding derivation of software specifications. Finally, the enterprise-software alignment is achieved in a component-based way, featuring a potential for re-using modeling constructs, such that the modeling effectiveness and efficiency are further stimulated. For the sake of grounding the presented studies, a case study and illustrative examples are considered. They are not only justifying the idea of bringing together (in a component-based way) enterprise modeling and software specification but they are also demonstrating various strengths and limitations of the proposed modeling approach. The book was mainly written for researchers and graduate students in enterprise information systems, and also for professionals whose work involves the specification and realization of such systems. In addition, researchers and practitioners entering these fields will benefit from the blended view on enterprise modeling and software specification, for the sake of an effective and efficient design of enterprise information systems.