Ivan Markovic

Towards a formal framework for reuse in business process modeling

Business process models are created by business users with an objective to capture business requirements, enable a better understanding of business processes, facilitate communication between business analysts and IT experts, identify process improvement options and serve as a basis for derivation of executable business processes. Designing a new process model is a highly complex, time consuming and error prone task. In order to address this problem, we propose an approach to business process modeling through reuse of existing business process artifacts - process fragments. In addition, we provide a rich formalism for business process description based on π-calculus and ontologies as a basis of the approach. The formalism integrates different workflow perspectives and thus exposes the complete process model description to expressive querying and reasoning.

Organisational Ontology Framework for Semantic Business Process Management

The field of Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) has refuelled interest in using ontologies for the representation of the static and dynamic aspects of an enterprise and value chains. Putting the SBPM vision into practice, however, requires a consistent and operational network of ontologies reflecting the various spheres of enterprise structures and operations. Consistent means that the ontologies are based on compatible paradigms, have a compatible degree of detail, and include at least partial sets of alignment relations which allow data interoperability. Operational means that the ontology specifications are available in a single, current ontology formalism for which scalable repositories, reasoning support, APIs, and tools are available. In this paper, we describe a set of ontologies for SBPM that follows the mentioned requirements, and compare our work with the related efforts.

Semantic annotation and composition of business processes with Maestro

One of the main problems when creating execution-level process models is finding implementations for process activities. Carrying out this activity manually can be time consuming, since it involves searching in large service repositories. We present Maestro for BPMN, a tool that allows to annotate and automatically compose activities within business processes. We explain the main assumptions and algorithms underlying the tool, and we overview what will be demonstrated at ESWC.

Advanced Querying and Reasoning on Business Process Models

In order to respond quickly to changing market requirements, a business organisation needs to increase the level of agility in all phases of the business process engineering chain. Business process (BP) modelling is the first and most important phase in this chain. Designing a new and redesigning an existing process model is a highly complex, time consuming and error prone task. The research question that this work investigates is how to facilitate the design of new and redesign of existing process models by utilizing Semantic Web technologies. We present an approach for querying and reasoning on business process models which i) supports decision making, ii) facilitates reuse of modelling artefacts and iii) helps ensuring compliance of models to relevant regulations.

Auto-completion for Executable Business Process Models

This work presents an auto-completion mechanism for supporting the creation of executable business process models. Currently, process modeling tools provide only little support to identify the relevant services that are needed to execute the process model – the selection of appropriate services is left to the skills of the modeler. A novel solution technique for this problem is proposed here as the combination of (1) a context-based analysis, (2) by taking pre and post-conditions into account, and by (3) evaluating the non-functional properties of the functionally and context-wise fitting services.

Organizational ontologies to support semantic business process management

The Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) aims at automation of the Business Process Management life cycle with use of semantics and Semantic Web services technology. The key issue to fulfil this aim is to provide an adequate machine-processable representation of processes. In this article we present one of the most important elements of process description, namely organizational ontologies. Moreover, we discuss their role in the early phases of SBPM and illustrate it with a set of application scenarios.

A conceptual framework for composition in business process management

In this work, we present a conceptual framework for deriving executable business process models from high-level, graphical business process models based on the paradigm of Service-Oriented Architectures and Semantic Web technology. We hereby envision a direct, but implicit link from a business analysts view on a process model to its execution driven by an IT system. This linkage enables the derivation of an execution-level model for newly created business process models as well as adaptation of the execution model after reengineering processes, possibly under certain re-design goals (such as quality, cost, execution time, flexibility, or others). The framework includes a component architecture and an algorithm that describes how to combine executable artifacts, such as (Semantic) Web services, in order to find an implementation that matches a given business process model. An extensible set of criteria can be used for validating the composition.

Querying in Business Process Modeling

To respond quickly to changing market requirements, businesses need to increase the level of agility in all phases of the business process engineering chain. Business process (BP) modeling is the first and most important phase in this chain. Designing a new and redesigning an existing process model is a highly complex, time consuming and error prone task. In this work, we contribute to BP modeling by i) analyzing the usage scenarios and identifying the types of queries which facilitate the design and increase quality of newly created BP models and ii) devising an approach to support querying in BP modeling.

Supporting Execution-Level Business Process Modeling with Semantic Technologies

When creating execution-level process models from conceptual to-be process models, challenges are to find implementations for process activities and to use these implementations correctly. Carrying out these activities manually can be time consuming, since it involves searching in large service repositories and cycles of testing and re-designing. We present Maestro for BPMN , a tool that allows to annotate and automatically compose activities within business processes, and to verify the consistency of an annotated process.

Strategy-Driven Business Process Analysis

Business Process Analysis (BPA) aims to verify, validate, and identify potential improvements for business processes. Despite the wide range of technologies developed so far, the large amount of information that needs to be integrated and processed, as well as the quantity of data that has to be produced and presented still poses important challenges both from a processing and presentation perspectives. We argue that to enhance BPA, semantics have to be the core backbone in order to better support the application of analysis techniques on the first hand, and to guide the computation and presentation of the results on the other hand. We propose a knowledge-based approach to supporting strategy-driven BPA by making use of a comprehensive and extensible ontological framework capturing from high-level strategic concerns down to lower-level monitoring information. We describe how corporate strategies can be operationalized into concrete analysis that can guide the evaluation of organisational processes, structure the presentation of results obtained and better help assess the well-being of corporate business processes.