Semantic Business Process Management for flexible dynamic value chains

01.09.2006 - 31.08.2008
Research funding project
The SemBiz project aims at bridging the gap between the business level perspective and the technical implementation level in Business Process Management (BPM) by semantic descriptions of business processes along with respective tool support. Current BPM technologies mainly focus on the level of technical details for handling and executing IT-supported business processes, neglecting the fact that BPM techniques are supposed to support handling of business processes at the business level. This results in the need for human expertise and intervention for mediating between the business and the technical level, which hampers the benefits of such technologies tremendously. Hence, in order to overcome these deficiencies, we aim at developing an exhaustive semantic description framework that allows managing business processes on the business level as well as support for automated execution of business processes on the technical level. The approach for realizing this is to take emerging frameworks for Semantic Web Services, namely the Web Service Modeling Ontology WSMO as a basis for defining an exhaustive semantic description framework for business processes. On basis of this, novel functionalities for BPM on the business level can be supported by inference-based techniques that work on semantic process descriptions. As the core functionalities for business level BPM, the SemBiz project aims at developing techniques for querying on business process spaces, discovering appropriate business processes for specific objectives, and composing business processes out of existing process fragments. These techniques will be integrated in a prototypical tool suite for business level BPM, and will be tested and evaluated in a real world use case of the telecommunication industry sector. In a nutshell, the SemBiz project provides an innovative approach for raising Business Process Management (BPM) to the business level, where it belongs, from the IT level where it mostly resides now.

People

Project leader

Project personnel

Institute

Contract/collaboration

  • eTel Austria AG
  • Hanival Internet Services GmbH

Grant funds

  • FFG - Österr. Forschungsförderungs- gesellschaft mbH (National) Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)

Research focus

  • Distributed and Parallel Systems: 100%

Keywords

GermanEnglish
Management von GeschäftsprozessenBusiness Process Management
Framework für semantische BeschreibungenSemantic description framework

External partner

  • Hanival Internet Services GmbH
  • eTel Austria AG
  • Universität Innsbruck

Publications