Formalising Workflow: A CCS-inspired Characterisation of the YAWL Workflow Patterns

We present work concerning the formal specification of business processes. It is of substantial benefit to be able to pin down the meaning of business processes precisely. This is an end in itself, but we are also concerned to do so in order that we might prove properties about the business processes that are being specified. It is a notable characteristic of most languages for representing business processes that they lack a robust semantics, and a notable characteristic of most commercial Business Process Management products that they have no support for verification of business process models. We define a high-level meta-model, called Liesbet , for representing business processes. The ontological commitments for Liesbet are sourced from the YAWL workflow patterns, which have been defined from studies into the behavioural nature of business processes. A formal characterisation of Liesbet is provided using Milner’s Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS). In this article, we omit some of the technical details of this characterisation and instead present the essential features by means of an abstract machine language, called LCCS. We also explain how we have facilitated the verification of certain properties of business processes specified in Liesbet , and discuss how Liesbet supports the YAWL workflow patterns. We include a simple three-part example of using Liesbet .     

Universal Enterprise Adaptive Object Model: A Semantic Web-Based Implementation of Organizational Self-Awareness

In this paper we present a novel conceptual model that systematizes the integrated management and adaptation of: (1) enterprise models, (2) their representations, (3) their underlying meta-models (i.e. their abstract syntax) and (4) the representation rules (i.e. concrete syntax for the respective models). All this for different modelling languages and also different versions of these languages. Thanks to our original use of the adaptive object model and type square patterns—normally applied in the context of software engineering, but here applied for enterprise engineering—we manage to provide a strong conceptual foundation for the development of software tools that allow a precise and coherent specification of models and their evolution and also of meta-models and their evolution. We also present a prototype of such a tool currently being developed to enable collaborative enterprise ontology model management using the Semantic MediaWiki as a base framework. This solution is solidly grounded on the theoretical foundations of organizational self-awareness and Ψ-theory of enterprise ontology and is a valuable contribution to facilitate general and distributed enterprise model management and also concrete and abstract syntax specification (i.e. the specification of a language's meta-model). This allows flexibility and ease of use in creation and adaptation of organizational models and also the use of semantic queries to detect and inform users on any violation of meta-model rules. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.