Presentation 

Workshop on Semantic Business Process Management - Organization Structure Description for the Needs of Semantic Business Process Management

This video was recorded at 5th Annual European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), Tenerife 2008. 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.

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