Extraordinary commitment and creativity finally pay off: Carolina Ming Chiao, a PhD student working at the DBIS institute, will receive a scholarship granted by the Ernst Wilken Foundation. In particular, this 1-year scholarship will enable her to continue her PhD project without any financial pressure. Thanks to the Ernst Wilken Foundation for this great support.

The Ernst Wilken Foundation ist a non-profit organization that originated from the Wilken GmbH - a software company located in Ulm, Germany. Focus of this foundation is on the support of outstanding accomplishments in fields like information technology, humanities, and art.

For some time, Carolina Ming Chiao has been working on her PhD project dealing with schema evolution in process- and object-aware information systems. The latter kind of information system targets at the modeling, enactment and monitoring of object-centric processes, which, in turn, necessitates a tight integration of business processes, data, functions, and users.  In particular, business processes and business data must not be treated independently from each other. Instead, business processes must comply with the underlying data structure; i.e., in accordance to the given data model comprising object types and object relations, the modeling, execution and monitoring of business processes should be based on two levels of granularity: object behavior and object interactions.  Furthermore, the individual processes, representing the behavior of single object instances, must be coordinated with the ones of related object instances. Thereby, process execution must be accomplished in a data-driven manner; i.e., the progress of a process instance mainly depends on available business objects and on value changes of their attributes.

Focus of Carolina's PhD thesis is on the controlled evolution and change of the process and data schemes in such process- and object-aware information systems. More information can be found at the homepage of the PHILharmonicFlows project.

In her PhD project Carolina Ming Chiao is supervised by Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert and Dipl.-Inf. Vera Künzle.