Process-Oriented Information Logistics: Aligning Process Information with Business Processes

During the last decade, research in the field of business process management (BPM) has focused on the design, modeling, execution, monitoring, and optimization of business processes. What has been neglected, however, is the provision of knowledge workers and decision makers with needed information when performing knowledge-intensive business processes such as product engineering, customer support, or strategic management. Today, knowledge workers and decision makers are confronted with a massive load of data, making it difficult for them to discover the information relevant for performing their tasks. Particularly challenging in this context is the alignment of process-related information (process information for short), such as e-mails, office files, forms, checklists, guidelines, and best practices, with business processes and their tasks. In practice, process information is not only stored in large, distributed and heterogeneous sources, but usually managed separately from business processes. For example, shared drives, databases, enterprise portals, and enterprise information systems are used to store process information. In turn, business processes are managed using advanced process management technology. As a consequence, process information and business processes often need to be manually linked; i.e., process information is hard-wired to business processes, e.g., in enterprise portals associating specific process information with process tasks. This approach often fails due to high maintenance efforts and missing support for the individual demands of knowledge workers and decision makers. In response to this problem, this thesis introduces process-oriented information logistics(POIL) as new paradigm for delivering the right process information, in the right format and quality, at the right place and the right point in time, to the right people. In particular, POIL allows for the process-oriented, context-aware (i.e., personalized) delivery of process information to process participants. The goal is to no longer manually hard-wire process information to business processes, but to automatically identify and deliver relevant process information to knowledge workers and decision makers. The core component of POIL is a semantic information network (SIN), which comprises homogeneous information objects (e.g., e-mails, offce files, guidelines), process objects (e.g., tasks, events, roles), and relationships between them. In particular, a SIN allows discovering objects linked with each other in different ways, e.g., objects addressing the same topic or needed when performing a particular process task. The SIN not only enables an integrated formal representation of process information and business processes, but also allows determining the relevance of process information for a given work context based on novel techniques and algorithms. Note that this becomes crucial in order to achieve the aforementioned overall goal of this thesis

Enterprise engineering using semantic technologies

Modern Enterprises are facing unprecedented challenges in every aspect of their businesses: from marketing research, invention of products, prototyping, production, sales to billing. Innovation is the key to enhancing enterprise performances and knowledge is the main driving force in creating innovation. The identification and effective management of valuable knowledge, however, remains an illusive topic. Knowledge management (KM) techniques, such as enterprise process modelling, have long been recognised for their value and practiced as part of normal business. There are plentiful of KM techniques. However, what is still lacking is a holistic KM approach that enables one to fully connect KM efforts with existing business knowledge and practices already in IT systems, such as organisational memories. To address this problem, we present an integrated three-dimensional KM approach that supports innovative semantics technologies. Its automated formal methods allow us to tap into modern business practices and capitalise on existing knowledge. It closes the knowledge management cycle with user feedback loops. Since we are making use of reliable existing knowledge and methods, new knowledge can be extracted with less effort comparing with another method where new information has to be created from scratch

An Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have been profiting from advances in ICT, but the decentralization and heterogeneity of the involved service entities still pose engineering challenges. One of these challenges is to achieve semantic interoperability among these autonomous entities. Semantic web technology aims at addressing this challenge on a large scale, and has matured over the last years. This is evident from the various efforts reported in the literature in which service knowledge is represented in terms of ontologies developed either in individual research projects or in standardization bodies. This paper aims at analyzing the most relevant service ontologies available today for their suitability to cope with the service semantic interoperability challenge. We take the vision of the Internet of Services (IoS) as our motivation to identify the requirements for service ontologies. We adopt a formal approach to ontology design and evaluation in our analysis. We start by defining informal competency questions derived from a motivating scenario, and we identify relevant concepts and properties in service ontologies that match the formal ontological representation of these questions. We analyze the service ontologies with our concepts and questions, so that each ontology is positioned and evaluated according to its utility. The gaps we identify as the result of our analysis provide an indication of open challenges and future work

Quality-aware model-driven service engineering

Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Quality aspects ranging from interoperability to maintainability to performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Architecture models can substantially influence quality attributes of the implemented software systems. Besides the benefits of explicit architectures on maintainability and reuse, architectural constraints such as styles, reference architectures and architectural patterns can influence observable software properties such as performance. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and evaluating the performance of implemented software. We present an approach for addressing the quality of services and service-based systems at the model-level in the context of model-driven service engineering. The focus on architecture-level models is a consequence of the black-box character of services

A monitoring approach for runtime service discovery

Effective runtime service discovery requires identification of services based on different service characteristics such as structural, behavioural, quality, and contextual characteristics. However, current service registries guarantee services described in terms of structural and sometimes quality characteristics and, therefore, it is not always possible to assume that services in them will have all the characteristics required for effective service discovery. In this paper, we describe a monitor-based runtime service discovery framework called MoRSeD. The framework supports service discovery in both push and pull modes of query execution. The push mode of query execution is performed in parallel to the execution of a service-based system, in a proactive way. Both types of queries are specified in a query language called SerDiQueL that allows the representation of structural, behavioral, quality, and contextual conditions of services to be identified. The framework uses a monitor component to verify if behavioral and contextual conditions in the queries can be satisfied by services, based on translations of these conditions into properties represented in event calculus, and verification of the satisfiability of these properties against services. The monitor is also used to support identification that services participating in a service-based system are unavailable, and identification of changes in the behavioral and contextual characteristics of the services. A prototype implementation of the framework has been developed. The framework has been evaluated in terms of comparison of its performance when using and when not using the monitor component