Business Process Management and Semantic Technologies B. Ramamurthy 5/8/2019

Plan for today Web Interface Design: Lets analyze an example from Netbeans samples Mid term review Chapter 10: relating SOABPMSemantic Technologies 5/8/2019

Introduction Business Process Management refers to activities performed by enterprises to optimize and adapt their business processes. Business process (BP) is an activity in a company that uses resources and can involve the activities of different departments. BP has been there for sometime but new impetus has been brought by BPMS, software tools, etc. Management of BP involves their design, execution and monitoring. 5/8/2019

Business Process Management BP Design: capture of existing processes and repositories to store process models. BP Execution: uses interfaces and human intervention to execute the defined processes. BP Monitoring: involves tracking of individual processes so that their state can be observed. Traditional BPM is confined to the boundaries of a business. The chapter defines a Collaborative Business Model (CBM) that extends BPM beyond the boundaries of a business.  exploits semantic web services composition engines to do so. 5/8/2019

Design of Collaborative Processes Modeling Business Process I Partner 1 SWS Composition Lowering Lifting Final CBP Manual Adaptation CBP Generator Alignment Modeling Business Process II Partner II 5/8/2019

Designing CBP The authors recommend using (semantic) Web Services (WS) composition to semi-automatically design a Collaborative Business Process (CBP). Lifting: transforming BP to WS Lowering: transforming WS to BP 5/8/2019

Semantic Web Services (SWS) Composition A semantic WS composition (service-enabling) works on semantically enriched descriptions of Web Services. 5/8/2019

Web service definition Web service description is in a WSDL WSDL consists of the definition of independent, atomic and stateless operations Operations, messages, ports and data types Data types are in XML schema (XSD) Messages are input and output messages WSDL definition will facilitate technical integration of services. Observe that WSDL does not have any information about behavioral semantics of a web service’s operation 5/8/2019

Semantic WS definition The components of the semantic web service definition include a formal description of WS functionality, its inputs and outputs and its behavioral requirements. The formal definition of SWS includes an annotation which is expressed by using ontology. Ontology consists of concepts, realtions and axioms. 5/8/2019

SWS definition Languages OWL-S WSMO (WS Modeling Ontology) METEOR-S WSDL-S 5/8/2019

WSMO Each WS description in WSMO contains a capability The capability describes WS’s functionality It is used for discovery and selection of appropriate services for a specific task as a WSMO goal. Choreography in WSMO describes behavioral requirements. This is different from choreography in WS-Choreography standard. 5/8/2019

SWS Composition The business partners participating in the composition provide SWS : in, out and capabilities in ontological terms. These are fed into the WS composition engine. Semantic engine looks for equivalent concepts in the behavior descriptions and connects them. After identifying matching concepts, the composition engine connects fitting input and output. Result of this process is: Business processes that contains steps from both partners Interconnection via mapping activities Other inputs and outputs that could not be connected as above Composition is successful when there are no more unconnected input and output. 5/8/2019

Lifting Transforming process description into format used by SWS composition engine. This is achieved by mapping the process descriptions to the elements of an ontology. Two parts: lifting in and out messages and lifting process description 5/8/2019

Ontology A very nice formal description is given in p.214 and Fig. 10.2 Lets understand this. 5/8/2019

Lifting WSDL messages msim matcher1 msim XSD’s Aggregation matcherN Domain ontology msim matcher1 msim Alignment XSD’s Aggregation matcherN Schema matching component 5/8/2019

Lifting (contd.) The architecture of the schema lifting component that creates the alignment between XML schema and the ontology This takes XML schema and domain ontology as input and yields an alignment Aso N matchers are used: distance matcher Synonym matcher Data type matcher Linguistic matcher Related entities matcher The outputs of matching then are aggregated to provide SWS. 5/8/2019

Lowering The CBP is defined as the process steps of the respective partners plus their appropriate interconnections. This step is quite straight forward. The composition did not alter the original process structure in the partners. 5/8/2019

Execution of CBP We know how to generate CBP How to execute CBP? Fig. 10.5 Fig. 10.6 shows examples of mapping extraction Types of rules used in mapping Move, join, merge, split, replicate 5/8/2019

Mapping rules move merge replication Lifting from source schema Lifting from target schema 5/8/2019

Deployment and execution of Partner processes See fig. 10.9 Two businesses execute the CBP designed by invoking the WS offered by the partners Each partner has an execution environment controlling only the execution of their respective CBP. Mediation is a important process during execution. 5/8/2019

Overall Procedure 10.9, p.227 5/8/2019

Implementation We studied the design of CBP. Lets examine the implementation details. Design using Maestro which is a part of SAP Research business process management tool suite. Each partner can create its own business process. Can be exported, discussed and interconnected with partner’s processes. Can be manually adapted (connected if needed) Workflow orchestrations can be created using a special tool called ILOG Lifting  ILOG  Orchestration + Alignment  Lowering WSDL and WS are deployed using Johnson, Gabriel and Nehemiah tools Finalization is needed before actual deployment in runtime. 5/8/2019

Demo Scenario Carrier Shipper Process Involves three parties: a customer, a shipper and a carrier Fig. 10.10 – 10.13 Interfaces, notifications. Contractual agreements, fulfillments need to be related. 5/8/2019

Cost-benefit comparison Agreement on common business terms Design CBPs using heterogeneous business processes Executing CBPs using heterogeneous message formats All these save time and effort in manual processing transformations 5/8/2019