Semantic Model Alignment for Business Process Integration

232 Pages·2017·2.05 MB·English

TTeecchhnnoollooggiiccaall UUnniivveerrssiittyy DDuubblliinn
AARRRROOWW@@TTUU DDuubblliinn
Doctoral Built Environment
2014-8
SSeemmaannttiicc MMooddeell AAlliiggnnmmeenntt ffoorr BBuussiinneessss PPrroocceessss IInntteeggrraattiioonn
Janina Fengel
Technological University Dublin
Follow this and additional works at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/builtdoc
Part of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons
RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn
Fengel, J. (2014) Semantic Model Alignment for Business Process Integration, Doctoral Thesis,
Technological University Dublin. doi:10.21427/D72P5M
This Theses, Ph.D is brought to you for free and open
access by the Built Environment at ARROW@TU Dublin. It
has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral by an
authorized administrator of ARROW@TU Dublin. For more
information, please contact [email protected],
[email protected].
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License
Semantic Model Alignment for Business
Process Integration

Janina Fengel, M.Sc.

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the
award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Dublin Institute of Technology

College of Engineering and Built Environment

Supervisors:

Dr. Roísín Murphy, Dublin Institute of Technology

Dr. Jenny Munnelly, Dublin Institute of Technology

Prof. Steve Jerrams, Dublin Institute of Technology

Prof. Dr. Bernd Steffensen, University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt, Germany

August 2014
ABSTRACT
Business process models describe an enterprise’s way of conducting business and
in this form the basis for shaping the organization and engineering the appropriate
supporting or even enabling IT. Thereby, a major task in working with models is
their analysis and comparison for the purpose of aligning them. As models can
differ semantically not only concerning the modeling languages used, but even
more so in the way in which the natural language for labeling the model elements
has been applied, the correct identification of the intended meaning of a legacy
model is a non-trivial task that thus far has only been solved by humans. In
particular at the time of reorganizations, the set-up of B2B-collaborations or
mergers and acquisitions the semantic analysis of models of different origin that
need to be consolidated is a manual effort that is not only tedious and error-prone
but also time consuming and costly and often even repetitive. For facilitating
automation of this task by means of IT, in this thesis the new method of Semantic
Model Alignment is presented. Its application enables to extract and formalize the
semantics of models for relating them based on the modeling language used and
determining similarities based on the natural language used in model element
labels. The resulting alignment supports model-based semantic business process
integration. The research conducted is based on a design-science oriented
approach and the method developed has been created together with all its enabling
artifacts. These results have been published as the research progressed and are
presented here in this thesis based on a selection of peer reviewed publications
comprehensively describing the various aspects.
i
DECLARATION
I certify that this thesis which I now submit for examination for the award of PhD,
is entirely my own work and has not been taken from the work of others, save and
to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of
my work.
This thesis was prepared according to the regulations for postgraduate study by
research of the Dublin Institute of Technology and has not been submitted in
whole or in part for another award in any other third level institution.
The work reported on in this thesis conforms to the principles and requirements of
the DIT's guidelines for ethics in research.

Signature __________________________________ Date _______________
Janina Fengel
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................. i
DECLARATION .......................................................................................................... ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................ iii
LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................... x
LIST OF TABLES ..................................................................................................... xii
LIST OF EQUATIONS ............................................................................................. xiii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ................................................................................... xiv
Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................... 1
1.1 Background ....................................................................................................... 1
1.2 Problem Definition ........................................................................................... 5
1.3 Research Motivation ......................................................................................... 8
1.4 Research Question .......................................................................................... 10
1.5 Thesis Outline ................................................................................................. 11
Chapter 2 LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................ 14
2.1 Business Process Modeling ............................................................................ 14
2.1.1 Business Process Modeling Languages ................................................... 15
2.1.2 Natural Language Use for Model Element Labeling .............................. 16
2.1.3 Model-based Business Process Integration ............................................. 17
2.2 Semantic Technologies ................................................................................... 19
2.2.1 Semantic Modeling .................................................................................. 20
2.2.2 Semantic Integration ................................................................................ 22
2.3 Use of Semantics for Model-based Business Process Integration .................. 24
2.3.1 Integration of Modeling Languages ........................................................ 24
2.3.2 Provision of Controlled Business Language ........................................... 27
iii
2.3.3 Application of Ontologies for Model Design .......................................... 29
2.3.4 Ontologizing Legacy Business Process Models ...................................... 30
2.4 Determining Semantic Similarity of Business Process Models ..................... 32
2.4.1 Searching Models .................................................................................... 32
2.4.2 Matching Models ..................................................................................... 34
2.4.3 Establishing Mappings ............................................................................ 36
2.5 Discussion ....................................................................................................... 37
2.5.1 Summary of Findings .............................................................................. 37
2.5.2 Research Gap Analysis ............................................................................ 41
2.5.3 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 48
Chapter 3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ............................................................ 52
3.1 Design-Science Based Research ..................................................................... 52
3.2 Research Design ............................................................................................. 54
3.2.1 Problem Identification ............................................................................. 55
3.2.2 Definition of Objectives .......................................................................... 56
3.2.3 Design and Development ........................................................................ 58
3.2.4 Demonstration and Evaluation ................................................................ 60
3.2.5 Completion and Dissemination ............................................................... 62
Chapter 4 SEMANTIC MODEL ALIGNMENT DEVELOPMENT ...................... 65
4.1 Requirements Analysis ................................................................................... 65
4.2 Method Conceptualization .............................................................................. 68
4.3 Method Design ............................................................................................... 69
4.4 Development of Supporting Artifacts............................................................. 74
4.4.1 Target Format Development for Model Decomposition ......................... 74
4.4.2 Format Development of a Modeling Concepts Ontology ....................... 76
iv
4.4.3 Format Development of the Unifying Modeling Concepts Ontology ..... 77
4.4.4 Development of Language-aware Semantic Matching ........................... 78
4.4.5 Design of the LaSMat Semantic Matching Tool ..................................... 82
4.4.6 Migration of a German Thesaurus ........................................................... 83
4.4.7 Format Development of the LaSMat Mapping Ontology ....................... 84
4.5 Completion ..................................................................................................... 84
4.6 Evaluation ....................................................................................................... 86
4.7 Publication of Results ..................................................................................... 88
Chapter 5 SEMANTIC INTEROPERABILITY ENABLEMENT IN E-
BUSINESS MODELING ........................................................................................ 90
5.1 Introduction .................................................................................................... 92
5.2 Background ..................................................................................................... 94
5.3 Semantic Referencing ................................................................................... 103
5.3.1 Ontologies as Semantic Foundations ..................................................... 104
5.3.2 Types of Ontologies .............................................................................. 110
5.3.3 Relating Ontologies ............................................................................... 113
5.3.4 Ontologizing Models ............................................................................. 116
5.3.4.1 Reengineering Terminologies ........................................................... 116
5.3.4.2 Reengineering Models ...................................................................... 117
5.3.5 Enabling Semantic Referencing ............................................................ 123
5.4 Future Research Directions .......................................................................... 130
5.5 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 131
Chapter 6 LANGUAGE-RELATED ALIGNMENT OF THE DOMAIN
SEMANTICS IN HETEROGENEOUS BUSINESS PROCESS MODELS ........ 134
6.1 Background and Motivation ......................................................................... 135
v
6.2 Semantic Analysis ........................................................................................ 137
6.2.1 Ontology Creation and Ontology Matching .......................................... 138
6.2.2 Capture and Formalization of Model Semantics ................................... 139
6.2.3 Semantic Alignment of the Natural Language of Designators .............. 141
6.2.4 Information Linguistic Procedures ........................................................ 142
6.2.4.1 Decomposition of Compounds ......................................................... 143
6.2.4.2 Disambiguation through Resolving Synonymy ................................ 143
6.2.4.3 Treatment of Stopwords ................................................................... 144
6.2.4.4 Stemming .......................................................................................... 145
6.2.4.5 String Matching ................................................................................ 145
6.3 Implementation ............................................................................................. 146
6.3.1 Technical Realization ............................................................................ 146
6.3.2 Computing Semantic Similarity ............................................................ 149
6.3.3 Interpretation of Results ........................................................................ 151
6.4 Application ................................................................................................... 151
6.4.1 Empirical Evaluation ............................................................................. 151
6.4.2 Detailed Analysis of the Method Combination ..................................... 153
6.5 Related Work ................................................................................................ 154
6.6 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 155
Chapter 7 BUSINESS SEMANTICS ALIGNMENT FOR BUSINESS
PROCESS MODEL INTEGRATION .................................................................. 157
7.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 158
7.2 Background ................................................................................................... 165
7.3 Semantic Analysis for Model Integration ..................................................... 172
7.3.1 Model Conversion ................................................................................. 172
vi
7.3.2 Analysis of the Modeling Language Semantics .................................... 174
7.3.3 Analysis of the Business Language Semantics ..................................... 177
7.3.4 Language-aware Semantic Matching .................................................... 179
7.3.5 Application ............................................................................................ 185
7.4 Future Research Directions .......................................................................... 187
7.5 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 187
Chapter 8 SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGIES FOR ALIGNING
HETEROGENEOUS BUSINESS PROCESS MODELS ..................................... 190
8.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 192
8.2 Research Method .......................................................................................... 195
8.2.1 Problem Identification ........................................................................... 195
8.2.2 Definition of Objectives ........................................................................ 196
8.2.3 Design and Development ...................................................................... 196
8.2.4 Demonstration and Evaluation .............................................................. 196
8.3 Related Work ................................................................................................ 197
8.3.1 Meta-Modeling ...................................................................................... 197
8.3.2 Application of Semantic Technologies ................................................. 197
8.3.3 Semantic Business Process Management .............................................. 198
8.3.4 Semantic Annotation ............................................................................. 199
8.3.5 Automatically Aligning Process Models ............................................... 200
8.4 Automating Semantic Model Matching ....................................................... 200
8.5 Semantic Model Alignment .......................................................................... 202
8.5.1 Model Semantics Extraction and Formalization ................................... 203
8.5.2 Semantic Model Linkage ....................................................................... 206
8.5.3 Label Matching ...................................................................................... 207
vii
8.5.4 Model Alignment ................................................................................... 210
8.6 Language-aware Semantic Matching ........................................................... 211
8.6.1 Matching Phrases ................................................................................... 212
8.6.2 Decomposition ....................................................................................... 212
8.6.3 Treatment of Stop Words ...................................................................... 212
8.6.4 Synonymy Resolution ........................................................................... 213
8.6.5 Stemming ............................................................................................... 213
8.6.6 String Matching ..................................................................................... 213
8.6.7 Determination of Semantic Correspondence ......................................... 214
8.7 Proof of Concept and Experimental Evaluation ........................................... 216
8.7.1 Proof of Concept .................................................................................... 216
8.7.2 Experiments ........................................................................................... 217
8.7.3 Findings ................................................................................................. 218
8.8 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 219
8.8.1 Summary ................................................................................................ 219
8.8.2 Results ................................................................................................... 219
8.8.3 Future Work ........................................................................................... 221
Chapter 9 CONCLUSION ..................................................................................... 222
9.1 Summary of Results...................................................................................... 222
9.2 Key Findings and Contribution to Knowledge ............................................. 223
9.2.1 Key Findings ......................................................................................... 224
9.2.2 Contribution to Knowledge ................................................................... 226
9.2.3 Scientific Contribution .......................................................................... 226
9.2.4 Contribution to Practice ......................................................................... 227
9.3 Limitations .................................................................................................... 228
viii