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 services
  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 WSs 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
XSDs
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 partners 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