Integrated Exploration of Data-Intensive Business Processes

Abstract

Modeling and reasoning over business processes require enterprises to manage and integrate large amounts of information. Despite process designers and engineers may benefit from a unified view of process and data models, integrating these two perspectives is challenging, especially when considering conceptual models. In this article, we provide a uniform formal representation of a process model, the schema of a related database, and the data operations connecting them. Then, we show how we can use such a formal representation to identify interesting information during the integrated conceptual modeling and analysis of processes and related databases, from a process (re-)design and improvement perspective. Finally, we discuss the evaluation of the proposed approach through a controlled experiment and a proof-of-concept implementation that considers both relational and XML database technologies.