1. Business Process Management and Semantic Technologies
B. Ramamurthy
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2. Plan for today
Web Interface Design: Lets analyze an example from Netbeans samples
Mid term review
Chapter 10: relating SOABPMSemantic Technologies
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3. 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.
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4. 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.
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5. 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
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6. 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
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7. Semantic Web Services (SWS) Composition
A semantic WS composition (service-enabling) works on semantically enriched descriptions of Web Services.
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8. 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
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9. 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.
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10. SWS definition Languages
OWL-S
WSMO (WS Modeling Ontology)
METEOR-S
WSDL-S
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11. 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.
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12. 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.
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13. 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
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14. Ontology
A very nice formal description is given in p.214 and Fig. 10.2
Lets understand this.
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15. Lifting WSDL messages msim matcher1 msim XSD’s Aggregation matcherN
Domain
ontology
msim
matcher1
msim
Alignment
XSD’s
Aggregation
matcherN
Schema matching
component
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16. 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.
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17. 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.
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18. Execution of CBP We know how to generate CBP How to execute CBP?
Fig. 10.5
Fig shows examples of mapping extraction
Types of rules used in mapping
Move, join, merge, split, replicate
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19. Mapping rules move merge replication Lifting from source schema
Lifting from target schema
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20. 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.
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21. Overall Procedure
10.9, p.227
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22. 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.
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23. Demo Scenario Carrier Shipper Process
Involves three parties: a customer, a shipper and a carrier
Fig – 10.13
Interfaces, notifications. Contractual agreements, fulfillments need to be related.
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24. 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
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