Semi-structured processes are those business or scientific processes whose lifecycle is not fully driven by a formal process model. Often, an informal description of the process is available in the form of a process graph, flow chart or an abstract state diagram, but the execution is not completely controlled by a central entity (such as a workflow engine), if at all. Instead, a variety of IT and human centric mechanisms are used, including email, content management systems, web-based forms, custom applications or a combination thereof.

Examples of semi-structured processes are collaborative and case oriented processes as well as most end to end line of business processes in commercial enterprises. Even when there is a formally managed process in place, there are often exceptional situations that fall outside the purview of the workflow engine, making measuring compliance against desired business & regulatory policies difficult. In spite of the widespread adoption of BPM technology, semi-structured processes are commonplace in today's commercial and governmental organizations.

Semi-structured processes, on the other hand, lack most of the advantages provided by business process management systems (BPMSs). In particular, one major advantage of process management is oversight through the inherent provenance of data and actions. Being able to answer the question 'Who did what when and how?' makes processes transparent and reproducible, supports compliance monitoring and root cause analysis, and provides the means for deep mining of activities and information.

The goal of this workshop is to investigate how to extend the oversight, traceability and compliance management of traditional BPMSs to semi-structured processes through techniques and algorithms to gather, correlate, analyze, and persist provenance data of processes execution. The workshop aims to bring together practitioners and researchers from different communities -- such as business process management, scientific workflow, complex event and compliance monitoring, data and process mining -- who share an interest in semi-structured processes. We encourage submissions that report the current state of research in the area and share practical experiences

The list of topics that are relevant to this workshop includes the following, but is not limited to:

• Methodologies for capturing, querying and processing provenance, including provenance of business process and scientific workflows.
• Management and implementation of compliance requirements.
• Provenance systems that enable traceability and compliance.
• Compliance and performance monitoring of collaborative processes.
• Legal audit support and root cause analysis.
• Data and process mining of provenance traces.
• Emerging standards and provenance models.
• Management and retention of process traces.

Hoboken, New Jersey, USA.

The workshop is colocated with the 8th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2010)

Francisco Curbera
IBM Research
New York, NY, USA
E-Mail: curbera@us.ibm.com

Juliana Freire
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UT, USA
E-Mail: juliana@cs.utah.edu

Frank Leymann
University of Stuttgart
Stuttgart, Germany
E-Mail: frank.leymann@iaas.uni-stuttgart.de

Beth Plale
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN, USA
E-Mail: plale@indiana.edu

Amit Sheth
Wright University
Dayton, OH, USA
E-Mail: amit.sheth@wright.edu

Fabio Casati, University of Trento, Italy

Marcelo Cataldo, Carnegy Mellon University, USA

Schahram Dustdar, TU Wien, Austria

Dimka Karastoyanova, University of Stuttgart, Germany

Jude Fernandez, SETLabs, Infosys, India

Geetika T. Lakshmanan, IBM Research, USA

Axel Martens, IBM Research, USA

Paolo Missier, University of Manchester, UK

Luc Moreau, University of Southampton, UK

Hamid Motahari, HP Labs, USA

Sudha Ram, University of Arizona, USA

Florian Rosenberg, CSIRO, Australia

Satya Sahoo, Wright University, USA

Heiko Schuldt, University of Basel, Switzerland

Mathias Weske, University of Potsdam, Germany

• Submissions due: May 21, 2010
• Notification: Monday, June 30, 2010
• Camera ready papers due: July 25, 2010
• Workshop Date: September 13 2010, Hoboken, NJ, USA

Two types of submissions will be accepted: full papers up to 12 pages reporting completed research, and short papers up to 6 pages reporting on-going and preliminary work. Authors are encouraged to plan for a demonstration of their work during the workshop.

The workshop proceedings will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing series and submissions should use LNBIP format (see http://www.springer.com/series/7911 for details).

Papers in electronic format (pdf version) should be submitted at
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tc4sp2010.

09:00 - Welcome and outlook (10 min)

09:10 - Invited keynote: Boualem Benatallah, University of New South Wales

From business processes to process spaces

Abstract: In this talk we will argue for a new process-centric environment referred to as Process Spaces. Process Spaces Management (PMS) aims at doing for processes what declarative data query techniques and their recent information integration extensions (e.g., data spaces) did for data. It should enable users (including non-experts) to define and manage process views over heterogeneous IT systems with little effort. The ubiquity of process and services will have little value if users cannot use, share and reuse them simply. Among other features, PSM should specifically support browsing, search, and analysis of process information within and between enterprises; seamless integration of process-related information items from different application and information sources; and managing process views over them. Clearly this a very ambitious objective and the underlying research issues constitutes difficult research challenges, whose investigations will require meaningful integration of concepts and techniques from various disciplines including tracing, integration and correlation, business process management, interactive visualization, and information sharing style of Web 2.0.

10:10 - A Heuristic Approach for Making Predictions for Semi- Structured Case Oriented Business Processes, Geetika Laksmanan.

10:30 - Break

11:00 - Rationale in Semi-Structured Processes, Udo Kannengiesser.

11:20 - Business Control Management: a Discipline to Ensure Regulatory Compliance of SOA Applications, Axel Martens.

11:40 - Enabling Cross-Application Traceability of Semi- Structured Business Processes, Andreas Emrich.

12:00 - Discussion (30 min)

Please register through the BPM 2010 conference registration site.

For additional information please contact Axel Martens at amarten@us.ibm.com .