COMPUTING, SOFTWARE, INTEGRATING THE DISTRIBUTED WORLDS

1st IEEE International Workshop on Semantics for Business Process Management (SemBPM 2008)

WORKSHOP THEME

The theme and emphasis of the workshop is on the intersection of Business Process Management (BPM) and Semantic Web Services (SWS) in order to increase automation and flexibility of business processes. The workshop creates a forum for discussion between researchers working on topics related to automation of Business Process Management and it aims at answering the question how and to what extent introduction of semantics can provide the desired improvements.

BACKGROUND AND GOALS

Business Process Management (BPM) refers to joint initiatives of business and IT people to enact and take control over full lifecycle of business processes: discovery, modelling, implementation, deployment, execution, interaction, monitoring, optimization, and analysis. Enactment of business processes in modern network enterprises involves a mix of manual and automated activities coordinated with assistance of software systems - Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs). Therefore, BPM specifies management models for business processes and defines organisational resources (including IT resources) to support achieving business goals.

A central problem for supporting all phases of BPM is still the usage and integration of various IT components within and across enterprises. The current trend for solving this issue is the use of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm - IT functionality is achieved by loosely coupled services with stable interfaces. However, even though the combination of BPM and SOA offers a flexible approach for automated support of business processes, there are many unresolved issues, especially when it comes to the smooth (automatic) transition from one phase to another. For instance, in existing BPM execution environments the resolution of the service types specified at design time to particular implementations is still hard-coded what makes processes less flexible and less adjustable to the current state of the environment. Therefore, process flexibility and automation requires improvements with respect to ad-hoc changes of processes.

Such improvements may be provided by usage of semantics. For instance, Semantic Web Services (SWS) develop techniques for automated discovery, composition, and execution of Web Services based on richer, semantic descriptions. Founded on ontologies, Semantic Web provides methods and tools for the machine-understandable representation of collective knowledge and business processes in which such knowledge resides. Current research shows that combining the worlds of BPM and SWS may be very fruitful.

TOPICS OF INTERESTS

Topics of interest include theoretical and/or empirical contributions related to intersections of semantics, business processes, process automation and management, services computing, and software engineering. Topics include but are not restricted to:

• semantics for business processes
• semantics for adaptive discovery and enactment of services
• semantic web as an enabler of business processes implementation
• integrating applications at the semantic level
• ontologies describing business processes
• utilizing knowledge embedded in business processes
• the process-centric computing paradigm
• management of full lifecycle of business processes
• evolution and adaptiveness of business processes
• service-oriented enterprise
• leveraging existing 'as is' processes and systems
• meta-modeling and executable business process specifications
• IT for better business agility
• the human aspect of business processes
• business process management and software development process

LIKELY PARTICIPANTS

Potential participants come from the field of Business Process Management as well as applications of semantic technologies including Semantic Web services. Semantic Business Process Management community, such as existing around the FP6 SUPER (Semantics Utilised for Process Management within and between Enterprises) project, is constantly growing and it therefore searches for more discussion opportunities. This workshop will not only further enable such discussions but it will also provide different and unique insights because of the participation of the software engineering researchers and practitioners.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Rainer ALT, University of Leipzig, Germany
Agata FILIPOWSKA, Poznan University of Economics, Poland
Ulrich FRANK, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Marek KOWALKIEWICZ, SAP Research, Australia
Dancheng LI, Northeastern University Shenyang, China
Krzysztof WECEL, Poznań University of Economics, Poland
Mathias WESKE, University of Potsdam, Germany
Jian YANG, Macquarie University, Australia

IMPORTANT DATES

SUBMISSION

Papers must be submitted electronically via the SemBPM 2008 submission site. Manuscripts will be limited to 6 pages including all figures, tables, and references. The format of submitted papers must follow the IEEE conference proceedings guidelines (i.e., 8.5" x 11", Two-Column Format (PDF: instruct.pdf; DOC: instruct.doc); Layout Guide (PDF: format.pdf; DOC: format.doc; all under ftp://pubftp.computer.org/press/outgoing/proceedings/).

Paper length and extra pages allowed in the proceedings:

• Full research papers: 6 pages, up to 2 extra pages for no more than 8 pages total. Note: there is a 250 USD charge per extra page to complete the paper registration
• Short papers: 4 pages, no extra page allowed
• Fast abstract: 2 pages, no extra page allowed
• Keynote/Invited paper: if approved/applicable. No more than 6 pages
• Panel description and position statement: ONE page. No extra page allowed

1. SemBPM 2008 Submission Page
2. IEEE Conference Publishing Service for COMPSAC2008

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS