CALL FOR PAPERS

First International Workshop on Traceability and Compliance of Semi-Structured Processes (TC4SP’10)

Held in Conjunction with BPM 2010,
The 8th International Conference Business Process Management

Hoboken, New Jersey, September 13, 2010


Background

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.


Topics

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.

Paper submission

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 be submitted electronically in PDF format at: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tc4sp2010 .

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).


Important dates

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

Organization

Francisco Curbera (IBM Research)
Juliana Freire (University of Utah)
Frank Leyman (University of Stuttgart)
Beth Plale (Indiana University)
Amit Sheth (Wright University)

Program committee

TBA