Hagen Overdick

Oryx --- An Open Modeling Platform for the BPM Community

In the academic business process management community, tooling plays an increasingly important role [8,6]. There are good reasons for this fact. Firstly, theoretical concepts benefit from exploration using prototypical implementation of the concepts. By experimentation based on real-world business processes, concepts can be evaluated and refined. Secondly, the practical applicability of the research work can be demonstrated, which is important to raise awareness of academic BPM research to practitioners.

Towards Resource-Oriented BPEL

Service orientation is the de-facto architectural style, today. But, what actually is a service and how should service boundaries be chosen? Resource orientation, once seen as a “light-weight” approach to Web services, is reshaping itself as a modeling strategy to service orientation. Along comes the realization that resources are in-fact complex state machines. Currently, there is no accepted standard for modeling the internal state of resources. In this paper, BPEL is proposed as a modeling language for resources and necessary extensions to BPEL are outlined.

Oryx --- Sharing Conceptual Models on the Web

In recent years, the complexity of software systems has risen sharply, so that the role of conceptual modeling is more important than ever. To capture this complexity, different groups of individuals are now involved in modeling different aspects of the system, rather than a few people modeling internals of a software system. These different groups of persons concentrate their modeling effort on different aspects of the system and use different modeling techniques, for instance UML structure diagrams and the Business Process Modeling Notation. Conceptual models are developed in a collaborative way, models are shared, reviewed, and finally agreed upon. In process modeling, for instance, experts from different companies discuss their business processes and how these interact.

RESTful Petri Net Execution

Representational State Transfer (REST) has received a lot of attention recently as architectural style for distributed systems made up of loosely coupled resources. While most research in process enactment focuses on BPEL and SOAP, most internet applications are based on REST. To leverage this new architectural style also for process enactment, this paper introduces process enactment in REST environments. The approach is based on Service Nets, a specific class of Petri nets supporting value passing and link passing mobility. Implementation considerations of a prototype are presented. The approach is compared with the traditional BPEL/SOAP approach to process enactment.

Lightweight collaboration management

Collaboration processes are generally coordinated without an explicit notion of a guiding process. Even though this kind of work is performed in a rather structured manner, explicit software support to coordinate these processes is rare. On the other hand, process automation is mainly considered for highly frequent processes, due to the cumbersome setup of adequate systems and the process implementation effort. This paper presents a mashup that effectively coordinates humans who strive for a collaborative goal. Participants can design and enact their processes right away; a lightweight process execution engine automatically coordinates participants through correlated messages. In contrast to classic mashups, we turn the architecture upside down and orchestrate Web applications and their respective service APIs. A process map, similar to classic mapping mashups, gives insight into the current state of a process and its activities as well as information that is required to evaluate and trace process history.

PoEM - Potsdam Encoding for Models

Modeling with graphical notations is characterized by a wide range of notations, stakeholders, and tools. In the course of this paper, a generic web-based model encoding and editing protocol is outlined to introduce a novel approach to modeling utilizing open web standards only. It eases tool integration, aids collaborative model editing and is ultimately supported by browser-based editing environments.