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Business Process Management and

Semantic Technologies

B. Ramamurthy

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Plan for today

Web Interface Design: Lets analyze an example from Netbeans samples

Mid term review Chapter 10: relating SOABPMSemantic

Technologies

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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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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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Design of Collaborative Processes

ModelingBusinessProcess I

ModelingBusinessProcess II

Lifting

Partner 1

Partner II

SWSComposition

Alignment

LoweringManual

Adaptation

FinalCBPCBP

Generator

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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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Semantic Web Services (SWS) Composition

A semantic WS composition (service-enabling) works on semantically enriched descriptions of Web Services.

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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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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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SWS definition Languages

OWL-S WSMO (WS Modeling Ontology) METEOR-S WSDL-S

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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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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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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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Ontology

A very nice formal description is given in p.214 and Fig. 10.2

Lets understand this.

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Lifting WSDL messages

XSD’s

matcher1

matcherN

Domain ontology

msim

Schema matching component

msim

AggregationAlignment

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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 Aso

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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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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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

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Mapping rules

move

merge replication

Lifting from source schema

Lifting from target schema

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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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Overall Procedure

10.9, p.227

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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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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.

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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