SBPM 2008

Technical Description of the Workshop

The degree of automation in the management of the business process space of single enterprises and whole value chains is still unsatisfying. A key source of problems are representational heterogeneities between the various perspectives and the various stages in the life-cycles of business processes. Typical examples are incompatible representations of the managerial vs. the IT perspective, or the gap between normative modeling for compliance purposes and process execution log data. As early as in the 1990s, researchers have evaluated the potential of using ontologies for improving business process management in the context of the TOVE project; however, the impact of that work remained beyond initial expectations.

Since 2005, there is now a renewed and growing interest in exploiting ontologies, of varying expressivity and focus, for advancing the state of the art in business process management, in particular in ERP-centric IT landscapes. The term “Semantic Business Process Management” has been suggested for the described branch of research in an early 2005 paper, which is now frequently cited as the first description of the overall vision. A flagship activity in the field is the European research project “SUPER”, with more than a dozen premier industrial and academic partners, among them SAP, IDS Scheer, and IBM.

In the past two years, substantial advancement has been made in investigating the theoretical and practical branches of this vision. However, the interdisciplinary nature of the topic requires a tight collaboration of researcher from multiple fields of, namely the BPM, SOA, Semantic Web, Semantic Web services, and Economics communities. There is a clear need for an annual event at which those communities meet, debate, challenge each others approaches, and eventually align their research efforts. Due to the strong involvement of Semantic Web researchers in the field, ESWC is the ideal target venue for this event.

In this workshop, we want to bring together experts from the relevant communities and help reach agreement on a roadmap for SBPM research. We aim at bundling experiences and prototypes from the successful application of Semantic Web technology to BPM in various industries, like automotive, engineering, chemical and pharmaceutical, and services domains. The particular focus is on deriving reusable best-practices from such experiences, and to yield convincing showcases of semantic technology.

Topics

In particular, we are inviting contributions addressing one or more of the following topics:

• Design-time aspects of Semantic Business Process Management:
  • Semantic modeling of business processes
  • Language issues (BPM languages to SBPM languages)
  • Business rules and SBPM
  • Semantics of existing modeling approaches
  • Mapping between Semantic Web languages and business process modeling
  • Semantic policy modeling and management for BPM
  • Reasoning for verifying semantic business process models
  • Reuse and adaptation of semantic business process models
  • Semantics for Collaborative BPM
• Run-time aspects of Semantic Business Process Management:
  • Dynamics and flexibility of SBPM implementations
  • Combination of business rules execution and workflow execution
  • Semantic web services for SBPM
  • Interoperability between conventional and semantics-enabled BPM solutions
  • Semantic analysis of BP execution
  • SBPM to support business activity monitoring and real-time business intelligence
  • Change management and evolution of business processes, including process mining
  • Personalized and context-aware process instantiation
  • Semantic Grid in SBPM
• Practical and business aspects of Semantic Business Process Management:
  • Business scenarios and case studies for SBPM in eBusiness, eGovernment, eHealth, production control, collaborative processes in logistics, engineering and management, ubiquitous computing, etc.
  • The role of BPM in SBPM
  • Migration from conventional towards semantics-based modeling
  • Contributions of SBPM for Corporate Performance Management
  • Critical success factors for the practical application of SBPM
  • Business benefits, evaluation aspects, and ROI of SBPM approaches
  • Standardization efforts relevant to or required for SBPM
  • SOA and SBPM
  • Reference models relevant to or required for SBPM
  • Combination of SBPM with quality management and IT service management
  • BPM and Web 2.0

Current Relevance of the Topic

Within the past years, the Semantic Web research community has brought to maturity a comprehensive set of foundational technology components, and this both at the conceptual level and in the form of prototypes and software. This includes, among other assets, ontology engineering methodologies, standardized ontology languages, ontology engineering tools, and other infrastructure like APIs, repositories, and scalable reasoners, plus a plethora of work for making the Deep Web and computational functionality in the form of Web Services accessible at a semantic level. However, the amount of visible applications and convincing showcases is still limited, in particular in the Business Process Management domain.

In particular, there exist many pressing challenges in business information systems, e-business, or the healthcare sector that would obviously benefit from the higher level of abstraction and the increase in automation that semantic technologies can offer; but dissemination of the state of the art in SW technology into the respective communities is still to be improved.

On the other hand has Semantic Web research reached a peak in public funding and research intensity. There is at this point in time an urgent need for presenting convincing showcases of semantic technology and use them

1. as a catalyst for disseminating the Semantic Web vision into real-world applications
2. steering future research focus and keeping up research interest
3. for justifying past and future investments into Semantic Web research from funding agencies and industrial enterprises

Also, the growing interest in lightweight, collaborative approaches requires an update of the SBPM research agenda.

Target Audience

The workshop aims at bringing together researchers from core Semantic Web research with colleagues from the following research communities and practitioner groups:

It is key to foster exchange between these communities and core SW research, since the former have a wealth of domain knowledge and a good understanding of the complexity of real-world problems, but lack a concise understanding of current SW research; while researchers working on foundational Semantic Web components often work with simplified assumptions about the future application domains.

Submissions

Proceedings will be published for the workshop as part of the CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073). Selected papers will be invited for fast-track review for an edited book on Semantic Business Process Management to be published by Springer in Fall 2008. When preparing your submission, please adhere to the following rules:

Important Dates

Deadline for submissions: May 1st, 2008 (12.00 AM, GMT)

Notification of acceptance: May 21th, 2008

Camera-ready versions: May 26th, 2008

ESWC'08 Conference: June 1st-5th, 2008

Workshop Day: June 2nd 2008, 2.00 - 6.00pm

Organizing Committee

Martin Hepp
Semantics in Business Information Systems Group
University of Innsbruck
Technikerstrasse 21a
A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
E-Mail: mhepp@computer.org
URI: http://www.heppnetz.de

Knut Hinkelmann
FHNW - University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland
School of Business
Riggenbachstrasse 16
CH-4600 Olten, Switzerland
E-Mail: knut.hinkelmann@fhso.ch
URI: http://knut.hinkelmann.ch

Dimitris Karagiannis
University of Vienna
Institute for Knowledge and Business Engineering
Bruenner Strasse 72
A-1210 Wien, Austria
Email: dk@dke.univie.ac.at
URI: http://www.dke.univie.ac.at/

Rüdiger Klein
Fraunhofer IPK
Pascalstraße 8-9
D-10587 Berlin, Germany
E-Mail: ruediger.klein@berlin.de

Nenad Stojanovic
FZI – Research Center for Information Technologies at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.
Haid-und-Neu-Str. 10-14
D-76131 Karlsruhe, Germany
E-Mail: nstojano@fzi.de
URI: http://www.fzi.de/ipe/mitarbeiter.php?id=483

Program Committee

Registration

The workshop is open to all members of the relevant communities. At least one author of each accepted submission must register for and attend the workshop. All workshop participants must pay the ESWC 2008 workshop registration fee, as well as the conference fee.

Detailed information about the registration is available at http://www.eswc2008.org/formulario-registro.jsf

Workshop Schedule

The Workshop is planned as a half-day event, including a keynote, paper presentations, demos, posters, and a panel discussion.

SBPM 2008 Agenda: June 2, 2008 - 14:00 – 18:30

Contact

To contact the OC members, please find the email addresses above.

Proceedings

The proceedings will be published in the CEUR WS series.

A PDF-version of the pre-proceedings is available here.

Related Workshops 2003-2007

SBPM 2008 will be the third event in a serious of very successful workshops at ESCW 2006 in Budva and ESWC 2007 in Innsbruck:

In 2007, the SBPM workshop attracted more than 30 participants and was described by most as extremely valuable for bringing together the respective communities. Please see http://sbpm2007.fzi.de/ for all details on SBPM 2007 and http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/sbpm2006 for SBPM 2006

Other past workshops and conferences that are related SBPM 2008 are the following:

• OntoLangBIS Ontologies and Language Technologies for Business Information Systems, Special Session in conjunction with the 8th International Conference on Business Information Systems BIS 2005, April 20-22, 2005, Poznan, Poland.
• Track “Semantic Web and Information Systems” at the 13th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS2005), May 26 - May 28, 2005, Regensburg, Germany.
• Workshop “Formal Ontologies Meet Industry”, June 9-10, 2005, Lake Garda, Verona, Italy.
• Workshop "OWL: Experiences and Directions”, November 11-12, 2005, Galway, Ireland.
• Semantic Technology Conference, March 6-9, 2006, San Jose, California, USA.
• Track “Semantic Web and Information Systems” at the 14th European Conference on Information System (ECIS 2006), June 12-14, 2006, Gothenburg, Sweden.
• 1st International Workshop on Semantic Technologies in Collaborative Applications (STICA 06), in conjunction with the 15th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE-2006), The University of Manchester, June 26-28, 2006, Manchester, UK.
• 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Data Engineering in E-Commerce and Services (DEECS 2006), in conjunction with CEC'06 and EEE'06, June 26, 2006, San Francisco, CA, USA.
• Track “Semantic Web and Information Systems” at the 12th Americas Conference on Information Systems, August 4-6, 2006, Acapulco, México.