Julius Köpke

Towards Living Inter-organizational Processes

Business Process Management (BPM) has gained significant adoption in practice for enabling organizations to increase their effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility. This broad adoption has not only been fostered by a rich and well-established theory to model, analyze, simulate, and enact business processes, but also by internationally accepted standards and mature technologies. Caused by the ever increasing speed and volatility of markets and the dynamics of new technologies, such as cloud infrastructures and mobile communications, we face a new generation of business processes, which we refer to as living inter-organizational processes. Such processes are not in control of one single organization, instead, they are enacted by multiple organizations, where no participating party possesses full control over the entire process. Such processes often involve a high number of actors that might even be unknown in advance. These actors require various degrees in participation, they are acting in heterogeneous environments. Moreover, such processes are often weakly structured or designed in an ad-hoc manner, and have to be continuously subject to evolution. Unfortunately, existing theories, methodologies, and technologies cannot cope with this challenging combination of aspects, which all have to be considered when dealing with living inter-organizational processes. The state of the art typically addresses singular aspects in isolation. However, a holistic approach to these challenges bears a tremendous potential. This paper aims to contribute towards a holistic approach to living inter-organizational processes. To this end, we describe different perspectives on inter-organizational processes and identify challenges for making them living processes.

Context-Aware UPnP-AV Services for Adaptive Home Multimedia Systems

One possibility to provide mobile multimedia in domestic multimedia systems is the use of Universal Plug and Play Audio Visual (UPnP-AV) devices. In a standard UPnP-AV scenario, multimedia content provided by a Media Server device is streamed to Media Renderer devices by the initiation of a Control Point. However, there is no provisioning of context-aware multimedia content customization. This paper presents an enhancement of standard UPnP-AV services for home multimedia environments regarding context awareness. It comes up with context profile definitions, shows how this context information can be queried from the Media Renderers, and illustrates how a Control Point can use this information to tailor a media stream from the Media Server to one or more Media Renderers. Moreover, since a standard Control Point implementation only queries one Media Server at a time, there is no global view on the content of all Media Servers in the UPnP-AV network. This paper also presents an approach of multimedia content integration on the Media Server side that provides fast search for content on the network. Finally, a number of performance measurements show the overhead costs of our enhancements to UPnP-AV in order to achieve the benefits.

Semantic annotation of XML-schema for document transformations

The W3C recommendation Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML-Schema (SAWSDL [7]) has the primary goal of annotating web service descriptions with a semantic model. In addition to the annotation of WSDL documents it can also be used to annotate arbitrary XML-Schemas. In this paper we will discuss the application of SAWSDL to create declarative annotations of XML-Schema. We will show problems that arise and present a solution that creates SAWSDL compliant annotations with the required expressiveness. Such an annotation method can then be used to assist automatic document transformations between different schemas. The transformations can act as an enabler for interoperable applications that exchange XML-documents.

Semantic invalidation of annotations due to ontology evolution

Semantic annotations assign concepts of a reference ontology to artifacts like documents, web-pages, schemas, or web-services. When an ontology changes, these annotations have probably to be maintained as well. We present an approach for automatically checking whether an annotation is invalidated by a change in the reference ontology. The approach is based on annotation paths and on the explicit definition of change-dependencies between ontology artifacts. Ontology change-logs and change dependencies are then exploited to identify those annotation paths which require maintenance.

View-based interorganizational workflows

We propose a new architecture for modeling and enacting of interorganizational business processes which captures both control flow and data flow aspects of web service orchestrations and choreographies. A major modeling concepts is a view mechanism to balance the problems of openness, privacy and coupling in cross-organization interactions. The view concept cares both for process abstraction and for data transformation between business partners. To cope with interoperability problems that arise from different data formats and internal schemas used by different choreography participants we support transformation of XML-based data types through our views. The approach allows a to enact interorganizational business processes in a fully distributed way without the need for any central coordinator.

Top-Down Design of Collaborating Processes

Interorganizational business processes aim to integrate local processes to support the seamless cooperation of organizations. Process view approaches are an adequate method balancing the communication requirements for enabling collaboration and the required privacy hiding internals of private business processes. We focus on a top-down scenario for the development of interorganizational processes, where first an abstract global process is designed. Then each step of the global process is assigned to one of the partners and a local process is generated for each partner as a view on the global process. Finally, the partners implement or adopt their processes based on their views. We present an algorithm for the fully automatic generation of views for any block-structured input process with arbitrary partner assignments, provide a method for merging the partners views to reconstruct the global process and prove the correctness of the view generation method.

Towards Quality-Aware Translations of Activity-Centric Processes to Guard Stage Milestone

Current translation approaches from activity-centric process models to artifact-centric Guard Stage Milestone (GSM) models operate on the syntactic level. While such translations allow equivalent traces (behaviors) of executions, we argue that they generate poor GSM models for the intended audience (including business managers and process modelers). A specific deficiency of these translations is their inability to relate to relevant domain knowledge, especially groupings of activities to achieve well-known business goals cannot be obtained by syntactic translations. Ironically, this is a main principle of GSM models. We developed an initial ontology based translation framework [14] that incorporates the missing knowledge for improved translations. In this paper we further extend this framework with two metrics for the assessment of quality aspects of resulting GSM translations with domain knowledge, propose a novel semantic rewriting algorithm that enhances the quality of GSM translations, and provide an evaluation of the achievable quality for different classes of input processes. Our evaluation shows that maximum quality scores are achievable if semantics and structure of the input processes are well aligned. Given poorly aligned input processes, a translation method can optimize one of the metrics but not both.

Projections of Abstract Interorganizational Business Processes

Distributed interorganizational business processes are constituted by cooperating private processes of different partners. These private processes must be aligned to fulfill the overall goal of the (virtual) interorganizational process. Process views are considered as an excellent concept for modeling such interorganizational processes by providing a good balance between the information needs and privacy requirements of the partners. We follow a top-down development approach, where first an abstract global process is designed. Then each task of the global process is assigned to one of the partners. Finally, a partitioning procedure is applied to generate views of the global process for each partner. The partners can then develop or adopt their private processes based on their views. We present a novel algorithm for the automatic partitioning of any block-structured process with any arbitrary assignment of partners and have proven its correctness.

Logical invalidations of semantic annotations

Semantic annotations describe the semantics of artifacts like documents, web-pages, schemas, or web-services with concepts of a reference ontology. Application interoperability, semantic query processing, semantic web services, etc. rely on a such a description of the semantics. Semantic annotations need to be created and maintained. We present a technique to detect logical errors in semantic annotations and provide information for their repair. In semantically rich ontology formalisms such as OWL-DL the identification of the cause of logical errors can be a complex task. We analyze how the underlying annotation method influences the types of invalidations and propose efficient algorithms to detect, localize and explain different types of logical invalidations in annotations.

Equivalence Transformations for the Design of Interorganizational Data-Flow

Distributed interorganizational processes can be designed by first creating a global process, which is then split into processes or views for each participant. Existing methods for automating this transformation concentrate on the control flow and neglect either the data flow or address it only partially. Even for small interorganizational processes, there is a considerably large number of potential realizations of the data flow. We analyze the problem of generating message exchanges to realize the dataflow in depth and present a solution for constructing data flows which are optimal with respect to some design objectives. The approach is based on a definition of the correctness of data flow and a complete set of transformations which preserve correctness and allow to search for an optimal solution from a generated correct solution.