Semantic business process management: An empirical case study (original) (raw)
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Semantic Business Process Management
Handbook on Business Process Management 1, 2010
Even though process orientation/BPM is a widely accepted paradigm with heavy impact on industry and research the available technology does not support the business professionals' tasks in an appropriate manner that is in a way allowing processes modeling using concepts from the business domain. This results in a gap between the business people expertise and the IT knowledge required. The current trend in bridging this gap is to utilize technologies developed for the Semantic Web, for example ontologies, while maintaining reusability and flexibility of processes. In this chapter the authors present an overview of existing technologies, supporting the BPM lifecycle, and focus on potential benefits Semantic Web technologies can bring to BPM. The authors will show how these technologies help automate the transition between the inherently separate/detached business professionals' level and the IT level without the burden of additional knowledge acquisition on behalf of the business professionals. As background information they briefly discuss existing process modeling notations like the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) as well as the execution centric Business Process Execution Language (BPEL),
Semantic business process management: A lifecycle based requirements analysis
2007
Despite of increasing software support for Business Process Management (BPM), currently there is still a low degree of automation in the BPM lifecycle, especially when it comes to bridge between the business and IT view on business processes. The goal of Semantic Business Process Management is to achieve more automation in BPM by using semantic technologies. In this paper, we describe on a conceptual level how ontologies and semantic web service technologies can be used throughout the BPM lifecycle, consisting of process modeling, implementation, execution, and analysis phases. The use of semantics in BPM results in new functionality a Semantic Business Process Management System (SBPMS) has to implement. For each phase of the BPM lifecycle, we identify the new functional requirements for a SBPMS, and explain the benefits of adopting semantic technologies in SBPM.
An ontology framework for semantic business process management
Proceedings of Wirtschaftsinformatik, 2007
A core challenge in Business Process Management is the continuous, bi-directional translation between (1) a business requirements view on the process space of an enterprise and (2) the actual process space of this enterprise, constituted by the multiplicity of IT systems, resources, and human labor. Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) [HeLD'05] 1 is a novel approach of increasing the level of automation in the translation between these two spheres, and is currently driven by major players from the ERP, BPM, and Semantic Web Services domain, namely SAP 2 . One core paradigm of SPBM is to represent the two spheres and their parts using ontology languages and to employ machine reasoning for the automated or semi-automated translation. In this paper, we (1) outline the representational requirements of SBPM, (2) propose a set of ontologies and formalisms, and (3) define the scope of these ontologies by giving competency questions, which is a common technique in the ontology engineering process.
Semantic business process analysis
2007
Current Business Process Management technologies cover all the process life-cycle but still suffer from many limitations with respect to their complexity, maintainability and degree of automation. Recent research initiatives aim at overcoming these limitations by introducing Semantic technologies in the process life-cycle. One of the steps that can benefit from this approach is the Business Process Analysis, that focuses on the delicate phase of studying, testing and evaluating existing and running systems and processes, with the aim of identifying the current system (process) state, as well as pointing out problems and bottlenecks, measuring key performance indicators and suggesting potential improvements. We believe that the use of Semantic Web can be of great help in improving and partially automating Business Process Analysis tasks. In this position paper, we explain how we envision the future of Semantic Business Process Analysis and we introduce the early results of our approach based on two different analysis methodologies, Reverse Business Engineering and Process Mining.
Semantic business process management: Scaling up the management of business processes
The IEEE International …, 2008
Business Process Management (BPM) aims at supporting the whole life-cycle necessary to deploy and maintain business processes in organisations. Despite its success however, BPM suffers from a lack of automation that would support a smooth transition between the business world and the IT world. We argue that Semantic BPM, that is, the enhancement of BPM with Semantic Web Services technologies, provides further scalability to BPM by increasing the level of automation that can be achieved. We describe the particular SBPM approach developed within the SUPER project and we illustrate how it contributes to enhancing existing BPM solutions in order to achieve more flexible, dynamic and manageable business processes.
Semantic business process modeling-benefits and capability
… -AI Meets Business Rules and Process …, 2008
Models describing business processes in a company nowadays have the drawback that they are not machine-processable for two reasons: First the terminology is not formalized. Second the dynamic semantics of the process model is not formally defined. ...
Semantic business process repository
2007
Despite of increasing software support for Business Process Management (BPM), currently there is still a low degree of automation in the BPM lifecycle, especially when it comes to bridge between the business and IT view on business processes. The goal of Semantic Business Process Management is to achieve more automation in BPM by using semantic technologies. In this paper, we describe on a conceptual level how ontologies and semantic web service technologies can be used throughout the BPM lifecycle, consisting of process modeling, implementation, execution, and analysis phases. The use of semantics in BPM results in new functionality a Semantic Business Process Management System (SBPMS) has to implement. For each phase of the BPM lifecycle, we identify the new functional requirements for a SBPMS, and explain the benefits of adopting semantic technologies in SBPM.
Based on an in-depth analysis of the existing approaches in applying semantic technologies to business process management (BPM) research in the perspective of cross-enterprise collaboration or so-called business-to-business integration, we analyse, discuss and compare methodologies, applications and best practices of the surveyed approaches with the proposed criteria. This article identifies various relevant research directions in semantic BPM (SBPM). Founded on the result of our investigation, we summarise the state of art of SBPM. We also address areas and directions for further research activities.
Organizational ontologies to support semantic business process management
2009
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 machineprocessable representation of processes. In this article we present one of the most important elements of process description, namely the organizational ontologies. Moreover, we discuss their role in the early phases of SBPM and illustrate it with a set of application scenarios.