Semantics for Business Process Management 2006


Call for Papers

 
 

In the recent years, enabled by powerful software frameworks and middleware solutions and by the tremendous success of web services and service-oriented architectures, business logic is more and more separated from lower levels of software applications and represented in increasingly expressive, more declarative formalisms. Thus, business-process oriented approaches gain more and more the same importance for software design as they already have for organizational optimization and for business (re-)engineering.

Business applications are more and more distributed and even cross-organizational. New, distributed computing paradigms raise our hopes for efficient, reliable, and cost-effective implementations of enterprise-wide and cross-enterprise software infrastructures. However, software-technological connectivity alone cannot yet bridge the long standing semantic gap between workflow technology and business-process management; it can not yet solve the semantic interoperability problems between people, applications, and companies; and it can not at all give an answer to the ever increasing demands on flexibility, dynamic service configuration and change, and process-optimizing real-time analytics which are just provoked by the new possibilities and application scenarios of ubiquitous and pervasive computing.

There is an increasing demand in adaptivity and flexibility of business processes, advancing business process management towards knowledge-intensive processes. While business rules promise to control or influence the behaviour of business, their integration with business process management and workflow execution is still an open issue. Declarative representation formalisms for rules and processes allow for consistency checking and support flexible workflow execution.

For all such problems, conventional business process and workflow technology is certainly not prepared. Fortunately, Semantic Web technology can offer powerful tools and techniques which

  • promise to increase significantly the flexibility and dynamics of process enactment (e.g., through adaptive resource allocation, ad-hoc decisions of process flows, real-time discovery of business partners and automatic mediation between tools, or through personalized and context-aware process models);
  • promise to support quality and reliability of systems and services (e.g., because they allow for more formal consistency checks and sophisticated compliance and business policy management); and
  • offer new optimization and analytical opportunities (e.g., by usage or process mining).

In this workshop, we invite researchers and practitioners from all involved disciplines for a "kick off event" to open up a new research strand towards intelligent engineering, management, and execution of business processes through the use of semantic web technology. In particular, we expect and encourage contributions from the areas of

  • business process engineering, management, and optimization,
  • workflow management,
  • semantic web services,
  • business rules,
as well as the respective standardization efforts.

We invite contributions on all theoretical and practical aspects of Semantics-enabled Business Process Management (SemBPM), especially emphasizing the real-world business and technology questions to be dealt with in realistic, useful SemBPM applications for eBusiness and eGovernment. The list of potential topics comprises, but is not limited to:

  • Design time aspects of Semantic Business Process Management
    • Semantic modelling of business processes
    • Business rules and SemBPM
    • Semantics of existing modelling approaches
    • Mapping between semantic web languages and business process modelling
    • Semantic policy modelling 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 SemBPM implementations
    • Combination of business rules execution and workflow execution
    • Semantic web services for SemBPM
    • Interoperability between conventional and semantics-enabled BPM solutions
    • Semantic analysis of BP execution
    • SemBPM 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 SemBPM
  • Practical and business aspects of Semantic Business Process Management
    • Business scenarios and case studies for SemBPM in eBusiness, eGovernment, eHealth, production control, collaborative processes in logistics, engineering and management, ubiquitous computing, etc.
    • Migration from conventional towards semantics-based modelling
    • Contributions of SemBPM for Corporate Performance Management
    • Critical success factors for the practical application of SemBPM
    • Business benefits, evaluation aspects, and ROI of SemBPM approaches
    • Standardization efforts relevant to or required for SemBPM
    • SOA and SemBPM
    • Reference models relevant to or required for SemBPM
    • Combination of SemBPM with quality management and IT service management

 
     
  Submissions  
 

Two categories of submissions are solicited:

  • full papers (up to 12 pages)
  • position papers (1-2 pages)

Full papers should be formatted according to the Springer LNCS style.

Please send submissions as PDF documents via email to

 
     
  Important Dates  
 
  Papers:
  Deadline:   19, April 2006
  Notification:   30, April, 2006
  Camera-Ready:   15, May, 2006
 
     
  Organisation  
 
Workshop Chairs:   Knut Hinkelmann, Univ. of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland
Dimitris Karagiannis, University of Vienna (Austria)
Nenad Stojanovic, University of Karlsruhe (Germany)
Gerd Wagner, Brandenburg Technical University (Germany)
     
Programme Committee   Andreas Abecker, FZI Karlsruhe (Germany)
Witold Abramowicz, Poznan Univ. of Economics (Poland)
Dimitris Apostolou, Planet (Greece)
Oscar Corcho, University of Manchester (UK)
Rose Dieng, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis (France)
Elmar Dorner, SAP Karlsruhe (Germany)
Christian Fillies, SemTalk GmbH Potsdam (Germany)
Gregoris Mentzas, NTUA Athens (Greece)
Michele Missikoff, IASI-CNR Roma (Italy)
Frank Leymann, University of Stuttgart (Germany)
Ulrich Reimer, FH St. Gallen (Switzerland)
Christian de Sainte-Marie, ILOG Paris (France)
Silvie Spreeuwenberg, LibRT Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Rudi Studer, AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (Germany)
Holger Wache, VU Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Krzysztof Wecel, Poznan University of Economics (Poland)