Universitat¨ des Saarlandes - Philosophische Fakultat¨ II Semantically-enriched Business Process Modeling and Management Dissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie der Philosophischen Fakult¨aten der Universit¨at des Saarlandes vorgelegt von Alexandra Weissgerber aus Forbach, Frankreich Saarbrucken,¨ 2011 Der Dekan Herr Univ.-Prof. Dr. Erich Steiner Berichterstatter Herr Univ.-Prof. Dr. J¨org Schutz¨ Herr Univ.-Prof. Dr. Johann Haller Tag der letzten Prufungsleistung:¨ 20 Juli 2011 i Acknowledgements To my sons, Mathieu, Philippe and Victorien Writing a dissertation is a long and stony road. In my opinion, it cannot be achieved without the support of beloved people. So my first thanks go to my family. My sons, who had to cope with my full time plan and my partner Patrick Ziegler who assumed kindly many of the daily tasks. Beside of his cooking talents, I really appreciated our professional exchanges where he shared his expert knowledge about enterprise management with me. I also thank my parents, Monique and Jean-Marie Weissgerber who gave me the possibilities to absolve my computer science study and supported me with their proudness, a feeling which was, shared by my grandma Elvire Z´ew´eand my sister Gabrielle Weissgerber. My partner's parents, Hiltrud and Hubert Ziegler supported me with the most valuable resource that I needed: time. They often took care of my little baby that will be 15 months when I will submit this dissertation. I also thank Sylvain Maik who offered me a MacBook, which was a really valuable programming computer. This dissertation is the result of experiences gathered through my professional life. Friends, colleagues and professional relations that I have met all these years have contributed to the result in a significant way. After my computer science study { and here I do not want to forget my professors at the IUT in Metz who personally got very involved in their students success {, I worked 10 years at the research institute IAI in Saarbrucken.¨ During all this time, I have felt like being member of a big family. I thank particularly the whole IAI team that enabled me to acquire all the linguistic competence that I needed to absolve my master in computational linguistic (DESS Industries de la langue). The IAI was managed jointly by Prof Dr J¨org Schutz¨ and Prof Dr Johann Haller. Prof Dr Haller gave me the chance to start at the institute even though I came to the interview accompanied by my mother! I am very happy that he accepted to be my second thesis supervisor. He supported me with feedback and information. I especially want to mention Dieter Maas who was a pillar of this institute and my colleague and friend V´eronique Hinz. I also will never forget Christoph Horschmann who has departed from us far too soon. It was a very hard and heartbreaking decision to close the chapter IAI. As I decided to follow new challenges, I had the luck to enter another great company with great colleagues, the IDS-Scheer AG at Saarbrucken,¨ which focuses on Business Process Management and Modeling. I was part of the development team and later development ii manager of the ARIS SOA Architect product (shortly described in this dissertation). The sensibility for language quality control I have acquired during my IAI years made me quickly recognize the problems that occur if no quality control is performed during modeling tasks, independently of the modeling environment. It is how the idea of this dissertation was born. I had several discussions with colleagues who gave me trust in the benefits of my work. Even though the dissertation was not financed and performed jointly with the IDS-Scheer, some of my colleagues provided me with training material and reference data that enabled me to test my approach. Sometimes we meet people who have a positive influence on our objectives in an unexpected way. I met Gerhard L. Duwer¨ in a soft skill seminar (called 'OFFBOX 1') that deals with leadership and self-management. He gave me a simple, but useful advice, which I want to share with the readers of my dissertation. I have started my thesis with the development of a prototype that gave me confidence in the necessity and feasibility of my approach. At this point, I did not really write something and suffered from the white page syndrome. I could not figure out how to write scientifically. Then Gerhard said to me: 'Do not try to write with a high quality. Write your ideas in your own language. Write only three sentences per day. If you can't, write two or even one.' I followed this advice and wrote three lines per day during one week in telegraphic style followed by a description of what I had implemented. This was the beginning of my dissertation. The final touch was given by Carola Niklaus, my proofreader, who contributed to the correction on language level and gave me according advice for future works. I warmly thank her! Last but not least, my first and foremost thanks are devoted to my doctoral thesis supervisor, Prof. Dr. J¨org Schutz.¨ He supported me since my first steps in this direction, when I still thought that I am not able to do a thesis. He gave me feedback that enabled a continuous improvement of my work, encouraged me to write papers and made me discover conferences. Even if in the first moment I did not appreciate some comments, I realized that he was right after according improvements. 'J¨org, your Champagne cave is now full... Let us start another one...' iii Contents Nomenclature viii Kurzfassung 1 Abstract 4 1 Introduction 7 2 The Domain of Enterprise Business Management 17 2.1 Business Intelligence . 18 2.2 Business Process Management (BPM) . 19 3 State of the Art 21 3.1 Enterprise Architectures . 22 3.1.1 Enterprise Architecture Fundamentals . 22 3.1.2 Service Oriented Architecture . 23 3.1.3 Model-Driven Architecture . 26 3.1.4 Additional Enterprise Management Considerations: Enterprise 2.0 27 3.2 Business Process Modeling Formalisms and Standards . 30 3.2.1 The Modeling Levels . 30 3.2.2 Business Process Modeling Notation . 33 3.2.3 Event-Driven Process Chain . 34 3.2.4 XML Process Definition Language . 34 3.2.5 Business Process Execution Language . 35 3.2.6 UML Activity Diagram . 36 3.2.7 Static Model Types . 36 3.2.8 Business Process Modeling and Quality Management Norms . 38 3.2.9 Standards for Business Modeling Content . 41 3.3 Semantic Web Technologies . 43 3.3.1 Resource Description Framework . 43 3.3.2 Web Ontology Language . 46 4 Employed Software and Methods 47 4.1 Text and Images Processing . 47 4.1.1 TeXShop............................... 47 4.1.2 Pencil ................................ 47 iv 4.1.3 Paint.net............................... 48 4.1.4 NeoOffice . 48 4.2 BPM Software and Methods . 48 4.2.1 ARIS Express . 49 4.2.2 ARIS SOA Architect . 49 4.3 Software Development Tools . 50 4.3.1 The Eclipse Integrated Development Environment . 50 4.3.2 The Eclipse Modeling Framework . 50 4.3.3 openArchitectureWare . 51 4.3.4 The JAVA Programming Language . 51 4.3.5 The PERL Scripting Language . 51 4.3.6 MySQL Database Management System . 51 4.4 Knowledge Representation Software . 52 4.4.1 FreeMind . 52 4.4.2 The Prot´eg´eOWL Editor . 52 4.5 Natural Language Processing Software . 52 5 Life Cycles of Enterprise Processes 54 5.1 The Business Process Governance Level . 55 5.2 The Process Design Phase . 56 5.3 The Process Modeling Phase . 57 5.3.1 The Business Process Modeling Workflow . 57 5.3.2 Object Naming Issues . 61 5.4 The Process Implementation Phase . 68 5.4.1 Service Discovery Issues . 68 5.4.2 Structural Description of Services . 70 5.4.3 Semantic Description of Services . 71 5.4.4 Service Abstraction Level . 74 5.4.5 Transformation of a Business Process into an IT Process . 76 5.5 The Process Execution Phase . 78 5.6 The Process Optimization Phase . 79 5.7 Issues Summary and Quality Impact . 80 6 Life cycle Support and Optimization through Semantic Technologies 83 6.1 Overview .................................. 83 6.1.1 Actors . 83 6.1.2 Functions and Features . 84 6.1.3 Interactions between Actors and Features . 85 6.2 Use Cases . 87 6.2.1 Process Modeling Time . 87 6.2.2 Process Optimization Time . 107 6.2.3 Process Implementation Time . 109 6.2.4 Process Execution Time . 119 6.2.5 Process Design Time . 122 6.2.6 Business Process Content Governance . 127 v 7 Constructing a Knowledge Matrix from Enterprise Repositories 148 7.1 Corpus Description . 149 7.2 First Dimension: the Business Language Workspaces . 151 7.2.1 Verbs Analysis . 152 7.2.2 Statuses Analysis . 160 7.2.3 Modifiers Analysis . 163 7.2.4 Nouns Analysis . 166 7.2.5 Summary of the Statistic Key Values and Conclusion . 176 7.3 Second Dimension: Relations between Terms and Concepts . 177 7.3.1 Knowledge Base Structure and Datatypes . 178 7.3.2 Supporting Techniques for Feeding the Knowledge Base . 190 7.4 Third Dimension: Aspect-Oriented Concept Classification . 205 7.5 The Knowledge Matrix . 211 7.5.1 Unidimensional Knowledge Matrix . 211 7.5.2 Multidimensional KM Entries Generation . 215 8 Enriched Life Cycles and Business Repository Interactions 218 8.1 Solution Overview . 218 8.2 SE-BPM Pre-processing Components . 221 8.2.1 The KM Lookup Annotator . 221 8.2.2 The LE Annotator . 222 8.2.3 The Homogenization Annotator .