Exploiting Semantic Activity Labels for Specialization of Abstract Process Activities Andreas Bögl, Michael Karlinger, Christoph Schütz, Michael Schrefl, and Gustav Pomberger This work is an outcome of the Vertical Model Integration (VMI) 4.0 project which is supported within the program Regionale Wettbewerbsfähigkeit OÖ 2007-2013 by the European Fund for Regional Development as well as the State of Upper Austria.

Overview Semantic Annotation of Business Process Activities Consistent Specialization of Business Process Activities by Label Specialization Future Work

Semantic Annotation of Activities Business Process Knowledge Base Semantic Activity Label Business Process Activity Repository

Linguistic Encoding of Activity Labels An activity label in a business process model as formulated by the modeler typically consists of: Words describing tasks/actions, e.g., “Verify”, “Define” Words describing process objects, e.g., “Order”, “Requirements”

Linguistic Encoding of Activity Labels An activity label in a business process model as formulated by the modeler typically consists of: Words describing tasks/actions, e.g., “Verify”, “Define” Words describing process objects, e.g., “Order”, “Requirements”

Linguistic Encoding of Activity Labels An activity label in a business process model as formulated by the modeler typically consists of: Words describing tasks/actions, e.g., “Verify”, “Define” Words describing process objects, e.g., “Order”, “Requirements” Interpretation of linguistic meaning of activity labels requires a description of the relationship between the used words

Linguistic Encoding of Activity Labels An activity label in a business process model as formulated by the modeler typically consists of: Words describing tasks/actions, e.g., “Verify”, “Define” Words describing process objects, e.g., “Order”, “Requirements” Interpretation of linguistic meaning of activity labels requires a description of the relationship between the used words The “Define” task is performed on the “Requirements” object.

Linguistic Encoding of Activity Labels An activity label in a business process model as formulated by the modeler typically consists of: Words describing tasks/actions, e.g., “Verify”, “Define” Words describing process objects, e.g., “Order”, “Requirements” Interpretation of linguistic meaning of activity labels requires a description of the relationship between the used words Semantic activity labels abstract from concrete lexical representations and encode in a machine-readable format process items and their relationships

Process Knowledge Base

Semantic Activity Label A semantic activity label over a process knowledge base consists of a set of process items and relationships from that process knowledge base.

Semantic Activity Label

Semantic Activity Label

Process Activity Repository A business process activity repository consists of a process knowledge base a set of process activities a set of semantic activity labels over the process knowledge base and a mapping from process activities to semantic activity labels

Behavior-consistent Specialization Two important definitions of behavior consistency based upon what a user observes (observation consistency), which activities a user may invoke (invocation consistency). Ebert, J. and Engels, G., 1994. Observable or invocable behavior – You have to choose. Technical Report, Universität Koblenz. We consider an activity S as an observation-consistent specialization of A if and only if the linguistic meaning of A is observable in S.

Consistent Activity Specialization The specialization relationships between process items and relationships in the process knowledge base determine a specialization hierarchy of activities

Consistent Activity Specialization The specialization relationships between process items and relationships in the process knowledge base determine a specialization hierarchy of activities

Specialization of Abstract Process Activities

Future Work Development of refinement and extension operators for activity labels in order to support modelers Process mining: Exploit semantic activity labels in order to find frequent process patterns in existing business process models