Communications of the ACM
Semantics-Based Software Boosts Company Performance
SUPER, a European research project, has developed software that expedites companies' development or adjustment of their business processes while realizing cost savings through the application of semantic Web technology. The tools yielded by the project augment the business usability of the service-oriented architecture approach to software development.
SUPER research consortium member Agata Filipowska says the project effectively brought together a trio of different research groups consisting of people working in the semantic Web, business process management, and information systems. Telecom business managers can model new business processes, seek out existing process fragments, automatically fill in the missing components in the process model, look for semantic Web services that will provide the functionality, organize business processes from available Web services, and perform implemented business process models through employment of the SUPER ontologies.
SUPER tools render business language as machine-readable language and vice versa, making expertise in the underlying information technology unnecessary.
In the first stage of SUPER, a business analyst can model a new process on his or her computer using familiar flowchart-like graphics. The executable description of the process is readied from the outputs of the semantic business process modeling phase, while further flexibility is injected via semantic Web services.
The SUPER tools oversee the performance of business processes during execution; in the analysis stage this data may be used to check the business processes against key performance indicators and deliver feedback for continuous process improvement.
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Abstracts Copyright © 2009 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA 
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