María José Ibáñez

Model Checking Analysis of Semantically Annotated Business Processes

Semantic business processes require new analysis techniques able to deal with behavioral properties that also consider semantic aspects. In this paper, a model checking method is introduced including semantic aspects in both the model description and the formula to be verified. In addition, Unary resource description framework (RDF) annotated Petri net systems, a formalism that allows the semantic description of business processes using RDF annotations, is formally defined and used to represent the input model of the model checker. Finally, the prototype implementations of both the Unary RDF annotated Petri net formalism and a model checker framework based on the use of RDF and SPARQL tools are also presented.

Analyzing behavioral properties of semantic business processes with parametric data

One of the basic problems in (semantic) business process management concerns the behavioral analysis at design time so that only correct processes are exposed. Although this analysis requires the semantic propagation of data and system preconditions through processes and between processes to be considered, some concrete data are usually obtained at runtime and cannot be used in early process development phases. This paper proposes Parametric Unary RDF Annotated Petri Net Systems (P‐U‐RDF‐PN Systems) as a formalism to alleviate this problem. The formalism allows analyzing behavioral properties of semantic business processes at design time. Parametric values are used to represent the data that will be obtained at runtime, allowing to also consider them in the analysis phase. The paper formally defines the semantics of the formalism in terms of enabling and firing of transitions as well as the concept of reachability graph. It also presents how to compute and analyze this parametric reachability graph. The analysis is based on an adaption of model checking techniques, being temporal logic the formalism used to specify the system properties to be analyzed. Finally, an implementation prototype using RDF and SPARQL tools and a Satisfiability Modulo Theories solver is presented, with some experiments evaluating how scalable the prototype is. Copyright

Control and data flow compatibility in the interaction between dynamic business processes

In the coming years, one of the challenges for business processes is to obtain a high degree of flexibility and ability to adapt to the changing contexts. Two key elements for achieving this are the use of Semantic Web technologies and the possibility of decoupling the business and the interaction aspects in a business process. Nevertheless, these solutions open up new challenges related to the necessity of checking whether a set of processes can successfully cooperate. Compatibility questions should be considered from a control flow point of view (the order of the interactions should be appropriate) and also from a data flow point of view (the information exchanged should be—semantically—adequate). In this paper, we concentrate on the compatibility of a set of processes executed in DENEB, a platform for the Development and ExecutioN of wEB processes based on the Net‐within‐Nets formalism and that follows a conversational approach. More specifically, this paper examines whether a set of interactions among a set of processes is compatible and also whether a given (imposed) interaction logic is compatible with a given business logic. Processes and their interactions have been semantically enhanced by means of domain ontologies and compatibility questions are studied using standard Petri net analysis techniques. Copyright

Semantically-enabled business process models discovery

Business process (BP) model discovery is a pillar technique for BP model reuse. Current discovery approaches cannot deal with the functional granularity gap that exists between BP models on the one hand, and BP queries on the other hand. In addition, they focus only on the structural dimension and do not consider functional and non-functional requirements. In this paper, we present an approach for BP model discovery which resolves the above problems. We present an RDF vocabulary which captures functional and non-functional aspects in addition to the control flow perspective. Having the functional and non-functional descriptions of basic activities, we use a set of algorithms to compute those of structured activities and therefore derive different representations of the same BP model at different granularity levels. Using a set of extraction rules, we build an RDF knowledge base that can be interrogated using SPARQL.

Semantically enabled business process discovery

Business process descriptions are usually stored in internal enterprise repositories. In order to be able to reuse Business Processes (a.k.a. BPs), BP designers require some tools to help them to discover processes (or fragments of processes) in the repository based on these descriptions. In most cases discovery is a difficult task (the diversity of modeling languages, the process descriptions are very close to the IT level being far from the business level, there is a lack of automatic tools, etc.). In this paper we investigate the use of semantics to alleviate the above mentioned problems providing with a method for the discovery of BPs. We have developed an RDF vocabulary to annotate and store BPs. First we use the vocabulary to annotate functional and non functional properties of basic activities of XML-based BP descriptions. Then we build an RDF knowledge base following the developed RDF vocabulary by extracting, in an automatic way, these properties and the structural properties from the BP description. In addition, functional and non functional properties of structured activities are automatically computed and added to the RDF knowledge base. Then the RDF knowledge base can be queried with SPARQL to achieve BPs discovery. In addition, we present an implementation prototype.

Unary RDF-annotated petri nets: a formalism for the modeling and validation of business processes with semantic information

One of the basic problems in semantic business management concerns the validation of semantic business processes. This paper introduces the Unary RDF Annotated Petri net systems as a formalism to model and analyze business processes with RDF annotations to deal with semantic information from both, data and control flow points of view. In addition, it shows how to use the reachability graph in order to analyze some behavioral business process properties including semantic aspects.