Semantics-based software boosts company performance

Description

Semantics-based software boosts company performance

(PhysOrg.com) -- New semantics-based software tools that accelerate the speed companies can develop or adjust their processes - while slashing costs - have resulted from a major European research project.

Tools developed by SUPER, a European research project, greatly enhance the business usefulness of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach to software development. The new tools raise business process management (BPM) to the business level where it belongs, from the IT level where it mostly resides now.

In SOA, software solutions are built up from individual building blocks that can be reused where the same task is repeated in a range of situations. The advantages of this approach are obvious. But searching out and assessing the usefulness of software fragments can require many hours of work by IT professionals with high levels of analytical skills. As the popularity of SOA grows, the complexity of the search problem increases exponentially.

The EU-funded SUPER project applied semantics and semantic web technology to the problem.

“SUPER successfully brought three different research groups together,” according to Agata Filipowska, from the Department of Information Systems at the University of Poznan in Poland, a member of the SUPER research consortium.

These groups comprise people working in the semantic web, BPM and information systems. The first group was interested in applying ontologies to describe enterprise models and business processes in general, to show the potential benefits of the application of ontologies for companies.

A second group was interested in the automation of the transition from business process models to execution. They also wanted to check the compliance ...

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