BPaaS Design Environment Prototype v1.0 (RESEARCH)

Downloads:

BPaaS Research - Demonstration Video: LINK

Library:

CloudSocket Prototype Library

BPaaS Annotation WebService:

WebApp Runner

CloudSocket Annotation WebService Prototype

BPaaS Annotation Matcher:

CloudSocket BPaaS Annotation Matcher

BPaaS Ontology:

BPaaS Ontology

APQC Ontology

Functional Business Process Description Ontology

General Overview

On the left-hand side there is the human-interpretable modelling environment which is implemented in ADOxx.org and referred to as BPaaS Modelling Environment. On the right hand side, there is the machine-interpretable ontological representation and the inferencing for the smart business and IT alignment. The ontology defines the semantics of the meta model elements. This means in particular that it contains class definitions for the modelling elements of business processes and workflows. Furthermore, it contains class definitions, which can be used to annotate models and model elements. The facts of the knowledge base are created by transformation, which creates instances and maps them to the corresponding classes of the ontology.

Business Process Model

For the business process modelling we use the BPMN 2.0 standard from OMG. In order to specify the requirements, we added the possibility to assign requirements to parts of a process.

This is performed by making a group for those tasks, which should be implemented by a cloud service and make a reference to a business process requirement specification. A group can include either a single task or several tasks.

Workflow Model

A workflow model reveals technical aspects of the business process and is therefore meant to be designed and understood by technical people. In particular, in contrast to business processes, workflow models do not have requirements. Instead there is a reference to descriptions of service functionalities and non-functional properties. However, since lanes in BPMN represent actors, and in workflows the cloud services are actors because they execute the task, we provide annotation references from the lanes to the workflow description.

Semantic Annotations

The web service creates and maintains the link to the different ontologies. The modelling environment calls the web service for a concept by providing the context and the web service returns the resulting classes and instances, depending on the context. The communication flow is shown in the following picture.

The user clicks on the "Set APQC" button and triggers the web service request. The request includes the context, which is in this case APQC.

The web service receives the request and queries the ontologies for sub-concepts (first level) of "AmericanProductivityAndQualityCenter" at the namespace "apqc". The result set of the query is converted into the interface requirements of ADOxx and returned to the modelling environment.

ADOxx receives the results and converts it into the selection box. The user can select the item that fits to the requirement that is being specified.

After the user selected the best fitting APQC categorization, the modelling environment asks the user for querying the next level.

If the user decides to increase the granularity of the annotation, "yes" needs to be clicked, if not, the user can stop on the current level by choosing "no". If yes is clicked, the modelling environment calls the web service again and takes the current selection as new context. If no is selected, the latest selection is transferred as value into the "APQC Annotation" attribute of the Business Process Requirement notebook.

Installation and Setup Notes

Prerequisites:

  • ADOxx 1.5 including wget
  • Java 1.8

Setup WebService

command line:

java -jar webapp-runner.jar BPaaS-Annotation-WebService-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.war

Setup BPaaS Annotation Matcher

Usually jar files can be opened by doubled clicking on it. If it does not work, open the command line, browse to the location where the file is stored and perform the following command

java -jar BPaaS-Annotation-Matcher-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar