Business Process Management and Semantic Technologies

1. Business Process Management and Semantic Technologies B. Ramamurthy

2. Plan for today • Web Interface Design: Lets analyze an example from Netbeans samples • Mid term review • Chapter 10: relating SOABPMSemantic Technologies

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.

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.

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

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

7. Semantic Web Services (SWS) Composition • A semantic WS composition (service-enabling) works on semantically enriched descriptions of Web Services.

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

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.

10. SWS definition Languages • OWL-S • WSMO (WS Modeling Ontology) • METEOR-S • WSDL-S

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.

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.

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

14. Ontology • A very nice formal description is given in p.214 and Fig. 10.2 • Lets understand this.

15. Lifting WSDL messages Domain ontology msim matcher1 msim Alignment XSD’s Aggregation matcherN Schema matching component

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.

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.

18. 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

19. Mapping rules move merge replication Lifting from source schema Lifting from target schema

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.

21. Overall Procedure • 10.9, p.227

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.

23. 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.

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