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Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns
This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.In modern organisations business process modelling has become fundamental due to the
increasing rate of organisational change. As a consequence, an organisation needs to
continuously redesign its business processes on a regular basis. One major problem
associated with the way business process modelling (BPM) is carried out today is the
lack of explicit and systematic reuse of previously developed models. Enabling the reuse of previously modelled behaviour can have a beneficial impact on the quality and
efficiency of the overall information systems development process and also improve the effectiveness of an organisation’s business processes. In related disciplines, like software engineering, patterns have emerged as a widely accepted architectural mechanism for reusing solutions. In business process modelling the use of patterns is quite limited apart from few sporadic attempts proposed by the literature. Thus, pattern-based BPM is not commonplace. Business process patterns should ideally be discovered from the empirical analysis of organisational processes. Empiricism is currently not the basis for the discovery of patterns for business process modelling and no systematic methodology for collecting and analysing process models of business organisations currently exists.
The purpose of the presented research project is to develop a methodological framework for achieving reuse in BPM via the discovery and adoption of patterns. The framework is called Semantic Discovery and Reuse of Business Process Patterns (SDR). SDR
provides a systematic method for identifying patterns among organisational data assets
representing business behaviour. The framework adopts ontologies (i.e., formalised
conceptual models of real-world domains) in order to facilitate such discovery. The
research has also produced an ontology of business processes that provides the
underlying semantic definitions of processes and their constituent parts. The use of
ontologies to model business processes represents a novel approach and combines
advances achieved by the Semantic Web and BPM communities. The methodological
framework also relates to a new line of research in BPM on declarative business
processes in which the models specify what should be done rather than how to
‘prescriptively’ do it. The research follows a design science method for designing and
evaluating SDR. Evaluation is carried out using real world sources and reuse scenarios
taken from both the financial and educational domains
Ontology-based patterns for the integration of business processes and enterprise application architectures
Increasingly, enterprises are using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an approach to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). SOA has the potential to bridge
the gap between business and technology and to improve the reuse of existing applications and the interoperability with new ones. In addition to service architecture
descriptions, architecture abstractions like patterns and styles capture design knowledge and allow the reuse of successfully applied designs, thus improving the quality of
software. Knowledge gained from integration projects can be captured to build a repository of semantically enriched, experience-based solutions. Business patterns identify the interaction and structure between users, business processes, and data.
Specific integration and composition patterns at a more technical level address enterprise application integration and capture reliable architecture solutions. We use an
ontology-based approach to capture architecture and process patterns. Ontology techniques for pattern definition, extension and composition are developed and their
applicability in business process-driven application integration is demonstrated
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A Semantic-based framework for discovering business process patterns
Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modeling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. This paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework synthesizes the idea from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse
Semantic model-driven development of service-centric software architectures
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a recent architectural paradigm that has received much attention. The prevalent focus on platforms such as Web services, however, needs to be complemented by appropriate software engineering methods. We propose the model-driven development of service-centric software systems. We present in particular an investigation into the role of enriched semantic modelling for a modeldriven development framework for service-centric software systems. Ontologies as the foundations of semantic modelling and its enhancement
through architectural pattern modelling are at the core of the proposed approach. We introduce foundations and discuss the benefits and also the challenges in this context
Toward the automation of business process ontology generation
Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) utilises semantic technologies (e.g., ontology) to model and query process representations. There are times in which such models must be reconstructed from existing textual documentation. In this scenario the automated generation of ontological models would be preferable, however current methods and technology are still not capable of automatically generating accurate semantic process models from textual descriptions. This research attempts to automate the process as much as possible by proposing a method that drives the transformation through the joint use of a foundational ontology and lexico-semantic analysis. The method is presented, demonstrated and evaluated. The original dataset represents 150 business activities related to the procurement processes of a case study company. As the evaluation shows, the proposed method can accurately map the linguistic patterns of the process descriptions to semantic patterns of the foundational ontology to a high level of accuracy, however further research is required in order to reduce the level of human intervention, expand the method so as to recognise further patterns of the foundational ontology and develop a tool to assist the business process modeller in the semi-automated generation of process models
Business integration models in the context of web services.
E-commerce development and applications have
been bringing the Internet to business and marketing
and reforming our current business styles and
processes. The rapid development of the Web, in
particular, the introduction of the semantic web and
web service technologies, enables business
processes, modeling and management to enter an
entirely new stage. Traditional web based business
data and transactions can now be analyzed,
extracted and modeled to discover new business
rules and to form new business strategies, let alone
mining the business data in order to classify
customers or products. In this paper, we investigate
and analyze the business integration models in the
context of web services using a micro-payment
system because a micro-payment system is
considered to be a service intensive activity, where
many payment tasks involve different forms of
services, such as payment method selection for
buyers, security support software, product price
comparison, etc. We will use the micro-payment case
to discuss and illustrate how the web services
approaches support and transform the business
process and integration model.
The business process modelling ontology
In this paper we describe the Business Process Modelling Ontology (BPMO), which is part of an approach to modelling business processes at the semantic level, integrating knowledge about the organisational context, workflow activities and Semantic Web Services. We harness knowledge representation and reasoning techniques so that business process workflows can: be exposed and shared through semantic descriptions; refer to semantically annotated data and services; incorporate heterogeneous data though semantic mappings; and be queried using a reasoner or inference engine. In this paper we describe our approach and evaluate BPMO through a use case
Service architecture design for E-Businesses: A pattern-based approach
E-business involves the implementation of business processes over the Web. At a technical level, this imposes an application integration problem. In a wider sense, the integration of software and business levels across organisations becomes a significant challenge. Service architectures are an increasingly adopted architectural approach for solving Enterprise Applications Integration
(EAI). The adoption of this new architectural paradigm requires adaptation or creation of novel methodologies and techniques to solve the integration problem. In this paper we present the pattern-based techniques supporting a methodological framework to design service architectures for EAI. The techniques are used for services identification, for transformation from business models to service architectures and for architecture modifications
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