The major objective of the
SBPM Working Group is the mechanization of Business Process
Management by using Semantic Web techniques and especially
Semantic Web Services.
Business Process Management (BPM) is the
approach to manage the execution of IT-supported business
operations from a business expert’s process
view rather than from a technical perspective. The
motivation for BPM is that organizations are trying hard to
continuously align their actual business processes, as
executed by the multiplicity of systems, with the should-be
processes as derived from business needs. BPM has gained
significant attention by both research and industry, and a
multiplicity of BPM tools are already available and in use.
However, the degree of mechanization in BPM is still very
limited, creating inertia in the necessary evolution and
dynamics of business processes. The major obstacle towards
mechanization of BPM and a truly unified view on business
processes is that the business processes inside the
organization are widely not accessible to machine
reasoning. Also, businesses cannot query their process
space by logical expressions, e.g. in order to identify
activities relevant for compliance with regulations or in
emergencies.
Semantic Web technology provides scalable methods
and tools for the machine-readable representation of
knowledge, especially ontologies as a means of capturing a
domain of discourse. Semantic Web Services
(SWS) make use of Semantic Web technology to
support the automated discovery, substitution, composition,
and execution of software components, namely Web Services.
BPM is a natural application for Semantic Web and
SWS technology, because the later provide large-scale,
standardized knowledge representation techniques for
executable artefacts. Our common goal is to
combine SWS and BPM, and develop one consolidated
technology, which we call “Semantic Business Process
Management”, or SPBM.
The basic idea of the SBPM approach is to
(1) represent and semantically describe each existing
atomic and composite process inside an organization as a
SWS in a process repository, (2) represent variants of
business process models in an ontology language, and (3)
use a SWS execution environment to mediate between business
goals and available processes. In order to achieve this
goal, we will have to perform the following
tasks:
First, we have to provide pre-defined horizontal
ontologies that can be used to annotate business processes.
Second, we have to provide vertical ontologies in
the chosen demonstration industry, i.e. the
telecommunication sector, to provide actual support for
domain-specific annotation. Third, we need to provide
fully-fledged tool support.
The SBPM Working Group brings together members from
academia, software vendors, and users in order to provide a
comprehensive set of techniques, tools, and standards in
order to make Semantic Business Process Management a
reality.