This week's contribution is courtesy of BPM-C member Paul Vincent from Tibco Software.
In mid-June, Freie Universitat Berlin hosted a Semantic BPM (SBPM) day to cover how semantic technologies (varying from rules and events through to ontologies and logics) can be used to enhance BPM. The 4 outside speakers showed some interesting variations in tackling SBPM...
First off was Dr Hartmut Strauss from the German standard body DIN, covering a business process end-user perspective. This was followed by Dr Frauke Weichhardt of Semtation, a business-level process modeling company covering OWL and BPMN type models via MS Visio extensions: of interest here was the move into MS Sharepoint as a knowledge repository for process and ontology components. The exploitation of non-semantic technology (Sharepoint) for semantic-enhanced models is an interesting crossover. Then we presented the a BPM vendor’s view of enhanced BPM (what TIBCO call “BPM+” – exploiting other technologies like CEP, decision management, SOA, visual BI and analytics). Some of the interesting BPM extensions in use today at customers include goal-driven BPM (directly relating, for example, business processes to goals that may be defined in a Business Motivation Model), and event-driven processes using alternative technologies like state models and inference rules.
The finale was Duane Nickull from Adobe on the crossover between semantic web technologies and the OASIS SOA Reference Architecture – where it was proposed that the main difference between business processes and services was that the latter are not cognisant of the caller’s context, whereas business processes are very much aware of the “bigger picture” (or should be!).
Overall, and this is a personal view, there are signs of definite “semantic creep” affecting BPM. Whether this is W3C OWL / OMG ODM providing high-level logical guidance for process and task definitions, the use of OMG SBVR for business governance and compliance of processes, or real-time event processing rule to provide information to and monitor the results of processes, and W3C RIF / OMG PRR decision rules and inferencing for dynamic processes – there is a lot going on!
Comments