Alta van der Merwe

Alta van der Merwe is a South African researcher with an interest in the information systems discipline and more specifically in Enterprise Engineering. She is currently a principal researcher at the CSIR, Meraka Institute within the HuFEE 1 research group.

Biography

Alta van der Merwe holds a PhD degree in computer science from University of South Africa, and became a full-professor at the University in 2008.

She was involved as lecturer at the Vaal University of Technology, the Potchefstroom Campus and from 1992 she was in the School of Computing, University of South Africa.

She has supervised several PhD and MSc students within the School of Computing of the University of South Africa. Alta van der Merwe joined the Meraka Institute in January 2009 as principal researcher, where her duties include research, human capital development (supervision of MSc and PhD students), being involved as an academic member in collaboration with universities, and playing a role in professional and subject societies such as IEEE.

She is a professor extraordinary at the University of South Africa, Potchefstroom University, Nelson Metropolitan University and Durban University of Technology. She is involved in collaborative projects at several institutions, including the institutions named, CPUT and Stellenbosch.

Alta van der Merwe is the founding member of the South African IEEE SMCS Chapter 2 where she is head of the Enterprise Information Systems interest group. She is also one of the founding members of the Enterprise Academic Research Forum (EARF) that meets once a month with participants from Universities, research groups and industry 3.

The EARF group defines Enterprise Architecture as ".. the continuous practice of describing the essential elements of a socio-technical organization, their relationships to each other and to the environment, in order to understand complexity and manage change".

She is also involved as one of the leaders in the Open Group Enterprise ARchitecture Academic workgroup, where the focus is on the enhancement of Enterprise Architecture research in the Open Group .

The ICEIS conference 4 host the 2nd International Workshop on Advanced Enterprise Architecture and Repositories where Alta van der Merwe is involved as one of the co-organizers.

In 2010 Alta the Technical Programme Chair of the Saicsit conference5 hosted in South Africa between 11-13 Ocotober 2010.

Publications

Alta van der Merwe has published several journal and peer-reviewed articles. A list of publications is available on her website

Some Recent Publications

A Framework and Methodology for Knowledge Management System Implementation.

Towards the use of formal ontologies in Enterprise Architecture framework repositories.

Towards an Enterprise Repository Framework

Key characteristics in selecting software tools for Knowledge Management

Requirements of a Security Framework for the Semantic Web

Van der Merwe, Alta; Kotze, Paula; (2009), A systematic approach for the identification of process reference models, Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering, IASTED 2009, Innsbruck, February 2009.

The Research Foci of Computing Research in South Africa as Reflected by Publications in the South African Computer Journal

Searching for the Technology in University of Technology .

Online Continuing Professional Development: tensions impacting on the reflective use of a mathematics-friendly forum environment .