Ontology-based metrics computation for business process analysis

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),

2005

Abstract Business process management (BPM) is the approach to manage the execution of IT-supported business operations from a business expert's view rather than from a technical perspective. However, the degree of mechanization in BPM is still very limited, creating inertia in the necessary evolution and dynamics of business processes, and BPM does not provide a truly unified view on the process space of an organization.

Proceedings of the …, 2007

Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) has been proposed as an extension of BPM with Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services (SWS) technologies in order to increase and enhance the level of automation that can be achieved within the BPM life-cycle. In a nutshell, SBPM is based on the extensive and exhaustive conceptualization of the BPM domain so as to support reasoning during business processes modelling, composition, execution, and analysis, leading to important enhancements throughout the life-cycle of business processes. An important step of the BPM life-cycle is the analysis of the processes deployed in companies. This analysis provides feedback about how these processes are actually being executed (like common control-flow paths, performance measures, detection of bottlenecks, alert to approaching deadlines, auditing, etc). The use of semantic information can lead to dramatic enhancements in the state-of-the-art in analysis techniques. In this paper we present an outlook on the opportunities and challenges on semantic business process mining and monitoring, thus paving the way for the implementation of the next generation of BPM analysis tools.

Communications of the ACM, 2005

A semantic approach to monitoring business process performance‖, Communications of the ACM, December 2005 Vol. 48, No. 12, p.55-59 *** Note: Made available courtesy of Association for Computing Machinery: http://www.acm.org/ © ACM, 2005. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Communications of the ACM, Vol. 48, no. 12

2019

Any industrial company has its own business processes, which is a number of related tasks that have to be executed to reach well-defined goals. In order to analyze, improve, simulate and automate these processes, it is essential to represent them in a formal way. The activity of representing business processes is known as Business Process Modelling (BPM); it is an active research area that attracts more and more attention with the emergence of Industry 4.0. Semantic Web technologies, especially ontologies, are promising means to advance BPM and to realize the Industry 4.0 vision. In this scope, we developed the BBO (BPMN 2.0 Based Ontology) ontology for business process representation, by reusing existing ontologies and meta-models like BPMN 2.0, the state-of-the-art meta-model for business process representation. We evaluated BBO using schema metrics, which showed that it was a deep and rich ontology with a variety of relationships. Thanks to a use case, we illustrated the ability ...

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.

… -supported business …, 2008

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) aims to support the real-time analysis of business processes in order to improve the speed and effectiveness of business operations. Providing a timely, integrated high-level view on the evolution and well-being of business activities within enterprises constitutes a highly valuable analytical tool for monitoring, managing and hopefully enhancing businesses. However, the degree of automation currently achieved cannot support the level of reactivity and adaptation demanded by businesses. We argue that the fundamental problem is that moving between the business level and the IT level is insufficiently automated and suggest an extensive use of semantic technologies as a solution. In particular, we present SENTINEL a Semantic Business Process Monitoring tool that advances the state of the art in BAM by making extensive use of semantic technologies in order to support the integration and derivation of business level knowledge out of low-level audit trails generated by IT systems.

Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Knowledge Management, 2019

Any industrial company has its own business processes, which is a number of related tasks that have to be executed to reach well-defined goals. In order to analyze, improve, simulate and automate these processes, it is essential to represent them in a formal way. The activity of representing business processes is known as Business Process Modelling (BPM); it is an active research area that attracts more and more attention with the emergence of Industry 4.0. Semantic Web technologies, especially ontologies, are promising means to advance BPM and to realize the Industry 4.0 vision. In this scope, we developed the BBO (BPMN 2.0 Based Ontology) ontology for business process representation, by reusing existing ontologies and meta-models like BPMN 2.0, the state-of-the-art meta-model for business process representation. We evaluated BBO using schema metrics, which showed that it was a deep and rich ontology with a variety of relationships. Thanks to a use case, we illustrated the ability of BBO to represent real business processes in a fine-grained way and to express and answer the competency questions identified at the specification stage.

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.

Evolving Towards the Internetworked Enterprise, 2010

In this chapter, we introduce the TEKNE Metrics Framework that performs services to monitor business processes. This framework was designed to support the prescription and explanation of these processes. TEKNE's most innovative contribution is managing data expressed in declarative form. To face this challenge, the TEKNE project implemented an infrastructure that relies on declarative Semantic Web technologies designed to be used in distributed systems.