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.
• Correlation analysis of process events for semi-structured processes
• Technology, methods and tools for exploring and understanding semi-structured processes across multiple systems and services.
• Methods and tools for analysis of conversation-oriented and social interactions of people in the context of semi-structured processes.

Clermont-Ferrand, France.

The workshop is colocated with the 9th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2011)

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

Hamid R. Motahari Nezhad
HP Labs
Palo Alto, CA, USA
E-Mail: hamid.motahari@HP.com

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

• Fabio Casati, University of Trento, Italy
• Schahram Dustdar, TU Wien, Austria
• Dimka Karastoyanova, University of Stuttgart, Germany
• Geetika T. Lakshmanan, IBM Research, USA
• Axel Martens, IBM Research, USA
• Paolo Missier, University of Manchester, UK
• Florian Rosenberg, CSIRO, Australia
• Satya Sahoo, Wright University, USA
• Heiko Schuldt, University of Basel, Switzerland
• Mathias Weske, University of Potsdam, Germany
• Sudha Ram, University of Arizona

• Submissions due (Closed): May 22, 2011 - Midnight HAST (Hawaiian Standard Time)
• Notification: July 1, 2011
• Camera ready papers due: August 5, 2011
• Workshop Date: August 29, 2011

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.

Papers should follow the same LNBIP formatting guidelines as defined by the BPM 2011 conference.

Papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tc4sp2011.

09:00 - Welcome

09:10 - Invited keynote: Professor Piero Fraternali, Politecnico di Milano, \ Milan, Italy

10:00 - A Noisy 10GB Provenance Database, You-Wei Cheah, Beth Plale, Joey K\ endall-Morwick, David Leake and Lavanya Ramakrishnan

10:30 - Break

11:00 - Towards an Integration of GRC and BPM – Requirements Changes Caused by Externally Induced Complexity Drivers, Thomas Schäfer, Peter Fettke and Peter Loos

11:25 - Designing an automated audit tool for the targeted risk exposure reduction, Yurdaer Doganata and Francisco Curbera

11:50 - An architecture for a blended workflow engine, Bernardo Oliveira Pinto and António Rito Silva

12:15 - Discussion (15 min)

For additional information please contact Francisco Curbera at curbera@us.ibm.com .