Enterprise applications of semantic technologies for business process management

Abstract

Today’s business process management (BPM) systems have evolved to provide rich and sophisticated tooling and runtime support for subject domain experts, business analysts, development, and information technology (IT). However, the evolution of BPM systems led to a jungle of different representation formats for the various artifacts in such systems. These include models for value chains, strategies, goals, and objectives on the analysis side, business process models, organizational data and service models, and finally models for the implementation of a BPM system to a runtime infrastructure. In many systems, the complex relationships between the entities of a BPM system are vaguely documented, let alone be formalized in a machine readable way. This is where semantic technologies kick in: to provide the foundation for formalizing the complex relationships of a business in a common model using Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies. This avoids information silos and enables a holistic view to a BPM system using SPARQL. We would like to give a short perspective on how BPM can benefit from the technical advances in semantic technologies over the last 10 years. BPM spans a wide range of concepts, technologies, and personas. From a top-down perspective, a BPM project typically starts with the definition of the company value chains, the strategies and goals that should be achieved, and the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are used to measure the success or failure of well-defined objectives. The value chains are further decomposed into supporting business processes (typically modeled in BPMN 2.0 (Silver, 2009)), applications, and services. An implementation of those artifacts is then performed using the tenets of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). We are considering the use of semantic technologies invaluable in formalizing the complex relationships between the involved entities of a BPM system and providing a unified method for query and business rules. Understanding the exact semantics of a BPM system will foster agility and reduce proliferation of services and processes in an enterprise.