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Forms-based Service Composition
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In many cases, it is not cost effective to automate business processes which affect a small number of people and/or change frequently. We present a novel approach for enabling domain experts to model and deploy such processes from their respective domain as Web service compositions. The approach is based on user-editable service naming, a graphical composition language where Web services are represented as forms, a targeted restriction of control flow expressivity, automated process verification mechanisms, and code generation for executing orchestrations. A Web-based service composition prototype implements this approach, including a WS-BPEL code generator.
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... The main distinction we make is whether a composition is created manually, by a human modeling the composition in a suitable language, or automatically, by a program that accepts a declarative description of the composition-to-be as well as the available services, upon which the program combines a suitable subset of the available services into a composition. Various languages have been proposed for manual composition, ranging from programming-like languages expressed in XML, such as the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) (OASIS 2007), over graphical languages such as Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) (OMG 2011), to domain expert-focused languages (Weber et al. 2011). We give an overview of the main approaches and explain how and where they are applied. ...
... On the side of WSC languages, a fairly recent development is the release of BPMN 2.0, including a profile for specifying choreography models. Another trend is end-user-focused WSC (Weber et al. 2011), i.e., simplifying the (manual) composition method to a point where business users can code compositions for their personal needs themselves. Last but not least, we want to mention techniques for looser coupling of compositions to Web services. ...
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In the previous two chapters, we focused on the core concepts and architectural approaches of different types of mashups. The purpose of the chapters was to explain—from a conceptual point of view—what it means to develop a mashup and which ingredients are necessary. We intentionally did not focus on any specific technology, programming language or development methodology, which we consider orthogonal issues that may change from mashup to mashup and are up to the developer. In this chapter, however, we would like to shed light on one specific approach to mashup development that is very prominent, that is, tool-aided mashup development, with a special focus on model-driven mashup development. With its component orientation and strong focus on reuse, mashup development naturally lends itself to further abstraction, automation and model-driven development. In this chapter, we therefore overview how model-driven software development (MDSD) can be tailored to visual mashup editors, provide a set of clarifying examples, and discuss what may be needed to accompany mashup editors with a complete mashup development platform.
In many cases, it is not cost effective to automate business processes which affect a small number of people and/or change frequently. We present a novel approach for enabling domain experts to model and deploy such processes from their respective domain as Web service compositions. The approach builds on user-editable service, naming and representing Web services as forms. On this basis, the approach provides a visual composition language with a targeted restriction of control-flow expressivity, process simulation, automated process verification mechanisms, and code generation for executing orchestrations. A Web-based service composition prototype implements this approach, including a WS-BPEL code generator. A small lab user study with 14 participants showed promising results for the usability of the system, even for nontechnical domain experts.
Process modeling is an important activity in business transformation projects. Free-form diagramming tools, such as PowerPoint
and Visio, are the preferred tools for creating process models. However, the designs created using such tools are informal
sketches, which are not amenable to automated analysis. Formal models, although desirable, are rarely created (during early
design) because of the usability problems associated with formal-modeling tools. In this paper, we present an approach for
automatically inferring formal process models from informal business process diagrams, so that the strengths of both types
of tools can be leveraged. We discuss different sources of structural and semantic ambiguities, commonly present in informal
diagrams, which pose challenges for automated inference. Our approach consists of two phases. First, it performs structural
inference to identify the set of nodes and edges that constitute a process model. Then, it performs semantic interpretation,
using a classifier that mimics human reasoning to associate modeling semantics with the nodes and edges. We discuss both supervised
and unsupervised techniques for training such a classifier. Finally, we report results of empirical studies, conducted using
flow diagrams from real projects, which illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Traditionally, workflow management systems aim at alleviating people’s burden of coordinating repetitive business procedures,
i.e., they coordinate people. Web service orchestration approaches, instead, coordinate pieces of software (the web services), hiding the human aspects that are intrinsically present in any business process behind the services. The recent emergence
of technologies like BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask, which introduce human actors into service compositions, manifest that taking
into account the people involved in business processes is however important. Yet, none of these approaches allow one to also
develop the user interfaces (UIs) the users need to concretely participate in a business process.
With this paper, we want to go one step beyond state-of-the-art workflow management and service composition and propose an
original model, language and running system for the composition of distributed UIs, an approach that allows us to bring together
UIs, web services and people in a single orchestration logic and tool. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the idea, we apply
the approach to a real-world home assistance scenario.
Modern enterprises are replete with numerous online proc- esses. Many must be performed frequently and are tedious, while others are done less frequently yet are complex or hard to remember. We present interviews with knowledge workers that reveal a need for mechanisms to automate the execution of and to share knowledge about these processes. In response, we have developed the CoScripter system (for- merly Koala ( 11)), a collaborative scripting environment for recording, automating, and sharing web-based processes. We have deployed CoScripter within a large corporation for more than 10 months. Through usage log analysis and in- terviews with users, we show that CoScripter has addressed many user automation and sharing needs, to the extent that more than 50 employees have voluntarily incorporated it into their work practice. We also present ways people have used CoScripter and general issues for tools that support automation and sharing of how-to knowledge.
Efforts and tools aiming to automate business processes promise the highest potential gains on business processes with a well-defined
structure and high degree of repetition [1]. Despite successes in this area, the reality is that today many processes are
in fact not automated. This is because, among other reasons, Business Process Management Suites (BPMSs) are not well suited for ad-hoc
and human-centric processes [2]; and automating processes demands high cost and skills. This affects primarily the “long tail
of processes” [3], i.e. processes that are less structured, or that do not affect many people uniformly, or that are not considered
critical to an organization: those are rarely automated. One of the consequences of this state is that still today organisations
rely on templates and paper-based forms to manage the long tail processes.
In this paper we present FormSys, a Web-based system that service-enables form documents. It offers two main services: filling in forms based on Web services' incoming SOAP messages, and invoking Web services based on filled-in forms. This can be applied to benefit individuals to reduce the number of often repetitive form fields they have to complete manually in many scenarios. It can also help organisations to remove the need for manual data entry by automatically triggering business process implementations based on incoming case data from filled-in forms. While the concept applies to forms of any type of document, our implementation uses Adobe AcroForms due to its universal applicability, availability of a usable API, and end-user appeal. In the demo, we will show the two core functions, namely soap2pdf and pdf2soap, along with use case applications of the services developed from real world scenarios. Essentially, this work demonstrates how PDFs can be used as a channel for interacting with Web services.
As programming skills increase in demand and utility, the learnability of end-user programming systems is of utmost importance. However, research on learning barriers in programming systems has primarily focused on languages, overlooking potential barriers in the environment and accompanying libraries. To address this, a study of beginning programmers learning Visual Basic.NET was performed. This identified six types of barriers: design, selection, coordination, use, understanding, and information. These barriers inspire a new metaphor of computation, which provides a more learner-centric view of programming system design
This paper describes preliminary work in the uncovering of mashup patterns in order to find new directions for the design of mashup tools. We conducted a qualitative survey of high-quality mashups, as nominated in two popular mashup directories, and examined how the mashups made use of existing websites or improved upon them, how data from multiple websites were combined, and what kinds of user tasks these mashups might be suitable for. We describe a set of patterns what we found in our sample of mashups.
This paper investigates the adoption of BPM, i.e., the use and deployment of BPM concepts in different kinds of organizations.
A set of 33 completed, industrial BPM projects is analyzed based on project documentation and interviews with involved project
members. In addition to the main study, which is conducted in the Netherlands, the paper also presents results of a replication
study in Germany comprising six interview-based case studies and an international survey among 77 BPM experts. Thereby, various
characteristics of BPM projects (such as a project’s objective, strategic orientation or focus area) are analyzed to derive
valuable insights both for practitioners performing BPM projects and for academics facing the challenge to support practitioners
with innovative solutions in the field of BPM.