TY - GEN
T1 - Modeling data for business processes
AU - Sun, Yutian
AU - Su, Jianwen
AU - Wu, Budan
AU - Yang, Jian
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - An important omission in current development practice for business process (or workflow) management systems is modeling of data & access for a business process, including relationship of the process data and the persistent data in the underlying enterprise database(s). This paper develops and studies a new approach to modeling data for business processes: representing data used by a process as a hierarchically structured business entity with (i) keys, local keys, and update constraints, and (ii) a set of data mapping rules defining exact correspondence between entity data values and values in the enterprise database. This paper makes the following technical contributions: (1) A data mapping language is formulated based on path expressions, and shown to coincide with a subclass of the schema mapping language Clio. (2) Two new notions are formulated: Updatability allows each update on a business entity (or database) to be translated to updates on the database (or resp. business entity), a fundamental requirement for process implementation. Isolation reflects that updates by one process execution do not alter data used by another running process. The property provides an important clue in process design. (3) Decision algorithms for updatability and isolation are presented, and they can be easily adapted for data mappings expressed in the subclass of Clio.
AB - An important omission in current development practice for business process (or workflow) management systems is modeling of data & access for a business process, including relationship of the process data and the persistent data in the underlying enterprise database(s). This paper develops and studies a new approach to modeling data for business processes: representing data used by a process as a hierarchically structured business entity with (i) keys, local keys, and update constraints, and (ii) a set of data mapping rules defining exact correspondence between entity data values and values in the enterprise database. This paper makes the following technical contributions: (1) A data mapping language is formulated based on path expressions, and shown to coincide with a subclass of the schema mapping language Clio. (2) Two new notions are formulated: Updatability allows each update on a business entity (or database) to be translated to updates on the database (or resp. business entity), a fundamental requirement for process implementation. Isolation reflects that updates by one process execution do not alter data used by another running process. The property provides an important clue in process design. (3) Decision algorithms for updatability and isolation are presented, and they can be easily adapted for data mappings expressed in the subclass of Clio.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84901815667&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICDE.2014.6816722
DO - 10.1109/ICDE.2014.6816722
M3 - Conference proceeding contribution
SN - 9781479925544
T3 - IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering
SP - 1048
EP - 1059
BT - 2014 IEEE 30th International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2014
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
CY - Piscataway, NJ
ER -