Complex mapping discovery for semantic process model alignment

• Authors: Ahmed Gater;Daniela Grigori;Mokrane Bouzeghoub
• Venue: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services
• Year: 2010

With the growing importance of processes in current information systems and service oriented architectures, there is an increasing need for automatic techniques allowing to compare process models. Examples of such applications are numerous: delta analysis, version management, compatibility and replaceability analysis of business protocols, behavior based service discovery. When comparing two process models, first a mapping between their activities have to be found, identifying activities that are either equal or similar. Finding such a mapping is quiet complex and should take into account activities' attributes (name, inputs/outputs), process structure and granularity differences that may exist in decomposing a given functionality. This paper presents an approach for automatic detection of corespondences between the activities of two semantic annotated process models (the annotations concern inputs/outputs of composing activities) that addresses these challenges. Specifically, the proposed technique is able to identify complex mappings (1-n) between activities and proposes also a process alignment (mapping between all activities) that takes into account process structure.