Semantics-based software set to boost manufacturers’ business performance
1 min read
Semantics-based software tools claimed to accelerate business process development, while also slashing costs, are among key outputs from a major European research project, according to ICT Results.
Agata Filipowska, from the Department of Information Systems at the University of Poznan in Poland, says that tools from the project, dubbed SUPER, raise business process management (BPM) to the business level where it belongs, from the IT level, where it mostly resides now.
He reminds us that in a SOA (service orientated architecture), software solutions are built up from individual building blocks that can be reused. The advantages are obvious, he says, but searching out and assessing the usefulness of software fragments can require many hours of work by IT professionals. What's more, as the popularity of SOA grows, the complexity of the search problem increases exponentially.
"SUPER successfully brought three different research groups together," says Filipowska – people working in the semantic web, BPM and information systems.
And that's the point: the first group was interested in applying ontologies to describe enterprise models and business processes in general. The second was pushing for automation of the transition from business process models to execution (and also compliance of processes with existing business rules). The third wanted to automate processes using the SOA approach and semantic web services.
SUPER focused on the telecommunications industry, but the tools can now be applied anywhere, says Filipowska, to model new business processes, search for existing process fragments, automatically fill in the missing elements in the process model, search for semantic web services that will deliver the functionality, compose business processes out of available web services and execute implemented business process models.
For example, SUPER is now helping Telefónica to build and maintain leading-edge IT solutions. And Filipowska says that members of the research consortium, including Polish Telecom and France Telecom, are also looking to exploit developments, while SAP, IBM and IDS Scheer are incorporating SUPER findings into their software offering.
"The main innovation and benefit of SUPER is that it supports business analysts as the main people driving the business modelling, implementation and analysis," enthuses Filipowska.
