Semantic business process management: a vision towards using semantic web services for business process management

Business process management (BPM) is the approach to manage the execution of IT-supported business operations from a business expert's view rather than from a technical perspective. However, the degree of mechanization in BPM is still very limited, creating inertia in the necessary evolution and dynamics of business processes, and BPM does not provide a truly unified view on the process space of an organization. We trace back the problem of mechanization of BPM to an ontological one, i.e. the lack of machine-accessible semantics, and argue that the modeling constructs of semantic Web services frameworks, especially WSMO, are a natural fit to creating such a representation. As a consequence, we propose to combine SWS and BPM and create one consolidated technology, which we call semantic business process management (SBPM

On the Modeling of Correct Service Flows with BPEL4WS

Frameworks for composing Web Services offer a promising approach for realizing enterprise-wide and cross-organizational business applications. With BPEL4WS a powerful composition language exists. BPEL implementations allow orchestrating complex, stateful interactions among Web Services in a process-oriented way. One important task in this context is to ensure that respective flow specifications can be correctly processed, i.e., there will be no bad surprises (e.g., deadlocks, invocation of service operations with missing input data) at runtime. In this paper we subdivide BPEL schemes into different classes and discuss to which extent instances of these classes can be analyzed for the absence of control flow errors and inconsistencies. Altogether our work shall contribute to a more systematic evolution of the BPEL standard instead of overloading it with too many features

Do Process Modelling Techniques Get Better? A Comparative Ontological Analysis of BPMN

Current initiatives in the field of Business Process Management (BPM) strive for the development of a BPM standard notation by pushing the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). However, such a proposed standard notation needs to be carefully examined. Ontological analysis is an established theoretical approach to evaluating modelling techniques. This paper reports on the outcomes of an ontological analysis of BPMN and explores identified issues by reporting on interviews conducted with BPMN users in Australia. Complementing this analysis we consolidate our findings with previous ontological analyses of process modelling notations to deliver a comprehensive assessment of BPMN

GRIDCC: Real-time workflow system

The Grid is a concept which allows the sharing of resources between distributed communities, allowing each to progress towards potentially different goals. As adoption of the Grid increases so are the activities that people wish to conduct through it. The GRIDCC project is a European Union funded project addressing the issues of integrating instruments into the Grid. This increases the requirement of workflows and Quality of Service upon these workflows as many of these instruments have real-time requirements. In this paper we present the workflow management service within the GRIDCC project which is tasked with optimising the workflows and ensuring that they meet the pre-defined QoS requirements specified upon them

Value-Oriented Design of Service Coordination Processes: Correctness and Trust

The rapid growth of service coordination languages creates a need for methodological support for coordination design. Coordination design differs from workflow design because a coordination process connects different businesses that can each make design decisions independently from the others, and no business is interested in supporting the business processes of others. In multi-business cooperative design, design decisions are only supported by all businesses if they contribute to the profitability of each participating business. So in order to make coordination design decisions supported by all participating businesses, requirements for a coordination process should be derived from the business model that makes the coordination profitable for each participating business. We claim that this business model is essentially a model of intended value exchanges. We model the intended value exchanges of a business model as e3 -value value models and coordination processes as UML activity diagrams. The contribution of the paper is then to propose and discuss a criterion according to which a service coordination process must be correct with respect to a value exchange model. This correctness is necessary to gain business support for the process. Finally, we discuss methodological consequences of this approach for service coordination process design

Translating semantic web service based business process models

We describe a model-driven translation approach between Semantic Web Service based business process models in the context of the SUPER project. In SUPER we provide a set of business process ontologies for enabling access to the business process space inside the organisation at the semantic level. One major task in this context is to handle the translations between the provided ontologies in order to navigate from different views at the business level to the IT view at the execution level. In this paper we present the results of our translation approach, which transforms instances of BPMO to instances of sBPEL

Semantic Description of Web Services and Possibilities of BPEL4WS

The using of the upsurge of semantics web technologies gives a possibility for an increasing of the flexibility, extensibility and consistency of the existent industrial standards for modeling of web services. In the paper the types of semantic description of web services and the degree of their realization in BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) respectively on the abstract and executable level are treated. The methods for using of BPEL4WS for the purposes of semantic web services in the direction of their semi-automatic integration are suggested

Identifying web service integration challenges.

Web services technology promises well for the future of Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi). However, this technology is still in its infancy and the community is facing many challenges. In this paper we discuss some important B2Bi issues and look how web services could play their part in these. Currently, many web services related standards are being drawn up, but most of these are still immature and do not bring a real answer to the proposed challenges. Consequently, many topics for future research can be identified.Information; Requirements; Cognitive; Integration; Community;

On-demand Business Process Integration Based on Intelligent Web Services

This paper proposes to make On-Demand business process integration based on intelligent Web Services. Business processes are modeled with BPEL4WS. They are incorporated into intelligent Web Services as their knowledge. Implementation framework and techniques are presented. A case of online auction is developed to demonstrate these concepts