Introducing a mashup-based approach for design-time compliance checking in business processes

Abstract

Business process compliance tries to ensure the business processes used in an organization are designed and executed according to the rules that govern the company. However, the nature of rules (expressed in natural language) and the large amount of elements that can be involved in them make their materialization and automated checking quite difficult. That is why the existing support for compliance checking is generally restricted to specific kinds of rules (e.g. rules affecting the control flow of the process). In this paper, we introduce compliance mashups, and show how a mashup-based approach can help solve the problem of rule specification and checking at design time. Some advantages of such an approach are that: (i) any kind of rule can be specified, which implies that each user can specify a rule according to his/her interpretation of the rule; (ii) building the compliance mashup is transparent to the formalism(s) used to implement it, so different techniques can be used together; and (iv) mashup components or parts of them can be re-used. As an example we use this approach to build mashups to specify and check rules related to human resource management in business processes at design time. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.