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Semantic business process space for intelligent management of sales order business processes

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Abstract

A company’s competitiveness relies heavily on its business processes and accurate knowledge to execute its business processes with agility and efficiency. Business Process Management (BPM) initially promised to provide the business world with suitable tools and techniques for successful BPM without help from the IT world. However, the current practice of BPM has several fundamental problems, including difficulty with automatic discovery and the integration of business processes across organizations. Understanding that the main cause of these problems lies in the lack of semantics on business process, we first define a variety of business process ontologies in order to build a semantic business process space (SBPS) for the limited area of sales order. We then explain how the SBPS satisfies the requirements for successful implementation of semantic BPM (SBPM) and demonstrate with a scenario how SBPM can be realized in the environment of SBPS. Our novel approach will reduce the time and cost necessary for the development of a new business process in a fast-changing environment and provide practitioners with useful insights into the proper implementation of the SBPM. Although our paper defines semantic business process knowledge for only a limited domain, its insights can be readily extended to other areas of business.

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Notes

  1. Business Process Space is defined as a place where all the facts associated with intra—and inter-organization business processes are stored and maintained.

  2. SBPS is a semantic knowledge space in which all information associated with business processes is stored and maintained in machine-understandable form.

  3. WSDL is the standard specification of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) used to define a web service in standardized message exchange formats (Chinnici et al. 2007).

  4. The initial version of BPEL, BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), was published in 2002, while the new one, WS-BPEL (Web Service Business Process Execution Language), was published in 2007 (http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsbpel/2.0/wsbpel-v2.0.html). The acronym “BPEL” stands for both versions.

  5. DAML + OIL stands for DARPA Agent Markup Language and Ontology Inference Language. DARPA, in turn, stands for Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. DAML + OIL is the predecessor of OWL (http://www.daml.org/language/).

  6. Communication protocol consists of two types of constraints on message exchange: 1) choreography determines the constraints on the ordering of messages between two parties (a service requester and a service provider), and 2) orchestration specifies constraints on coordination among the interacting web services of organizations.

  7. http://www.daml.org/services/owl-s/

  8. The MINDSWAP Group at University of Maryland has been conducting a variety of studies and projects to develop tools and techniques such as OWL-S API and WSDL2OWLS which are useful for the implementation of semantic web services (http://www.mindswap.org/).

  9. Because organizations normally use their own internal workflow languages that are independent of the workflow languages of other organizations, it is necessary to implement a uniform choreography interface to execute business process between collaborative organizations.

  10. Business Process Query Language (BPQL) (Deutch and Milo 2007), a visual structural query language based on business process pattern, was developed in accordance with BPEL specification. However, BPQL does not support semantic queries because the BPEL specifies syntactic information to execute business processes.

  11. http://www.oasis-open.org/home/index.php/ (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information)

  12. http://www.wfmc.org/ (Workflow Management Coalition)

  13. http://www.bpmi.org/ (Business Process Management Initiative)

  14. http://www.omg.org/ (Object Management Group)

  15. http://www.ids-scheer.com/

  16. http://www.e2ebridge.com/

  17. http://www.wfmc.org/XPDL/ (XML Process Definition Language)

  18. http://www.omg.org/docs/formal/08-01-17.pdf/ (Business Process Modeling Notation Specification)

  19. http://www.ids-scheer.com/en/ARIS/ARIS_Solutions/5740.html/

  20. http://www.e2ebridge.com/en/solutions/bridge-4-process.asp/

  21. For example, prior to defining partner link in the BPEL specification to invoke a web service, one must define port types of the web service in the WSDL specification.

  22. Since the SAP R/3 ERP application, which implements globally standardized and optimized business processes, includes comprehensive domain knowledge, we decided to analyze the business processes defined by the application.

  23. Among a number of prominent formal methodologies including EPC and BPMN, This paper applies the EPC modeling methodology, which is used commonly by both the research community and industry.

  24. Some of concepts in RO are defined by referring to the EPC—resource object types. Because more than 100 resource object types are defined in the EPC, we have selected the resource types that are the most suitable for our objective of managing business processes in the context of SOA.

  25. We reuse the Currency ontology (http://www.daml.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ont/currency.owl) developed by the University of Southampton in the UK.

  26. http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/RIF_Working_Group

  27. http://protege.stanford.edu/

  28. All the knowledge on business processes in machine-understandable form is represented to stakeholders in the business world and the IT world as a form that is relevant to them using suitable tools for design, modification, execution, and analysis of the business process.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their gratitude to anonymous reviewers for the constructive comments on the paper. The reviewers’ comments helped the authors improve the paper’s structure and readability and transform it in much better shape.

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  1. Korea University Business School, 5-ka, Anam-dong, Sungbuk-gu, Seoul, 136-701, South Korea

    Gunwoo Kim & Yongmoo Suh

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  1. Gunwoo Kim
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Kim, G., Suh, Y. Semantic business process space for intelligent management of sales order business processes. Inf Syst Front 13, 515–542 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-010-9229-1

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