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Finding Non-compliances with Declarative Process Constraints Through Semantic Technologies

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Information Systems Engineering in Responsible Information Systems (CAiSE 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 350))

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Abstract

Business process compliance checking enables organisations to assess whether their processes fulfil a given set of constraints, such as regulations, laws, or guidelines. Whilst many process analysts still rely on ad-hoc, often handcrafted per-case checks, a variety of constraint languages and approaches have been developed in recent years to provide automated compliance checking. A salient example is Declare, a well-established declarative process specification language based on temporal logics. Declare specifies the behaviour of processes through temporal rules that constrain the execution of tasks. So far, however, automated compliance checking approaches typically report compliance only at the aggregate level, using binary evaluations of constraints on execution traces. Consequently, their results lack granular information on violations and their context, which hampers auditability of process data for analytic and forensic purposes. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that leverages semantic technologies for compliance checking. Our approach proceeds in two stages. First, we translate Declare templates into statements in SHACL, a graph-based constraint language. Then, we evaluate the resulting constraints on the graph-based, semantic representation of process execution logs. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by testing its implementation on real-world event logs. Finally, we discuss its implications and future research directions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.omg.org/spec/CMMN/1.1.

  2. 2.

    https://doi.org/10.1109/IEEESTD.2016.7740858.

  3. 3.

    http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-primer/.

  4. 4.

    http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-primer/.

  5. 5.

    https://www.w3.org/TR/shacl/.

  6. 6.

    http://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-query/.

  7. 7.

    http://wiki.ruleml.org/index.php/RuleML_Home.

  8. 8.

    https://www.w3.org/Submission/SWRL.

  9. 9.

    Hence, we call it SHACLare.

  10. 10.

    http://rml.io/RMLmappingLanguage.

  11. 11.

    https://www.w3.org/TR/turtle/.

  12. 12.

    Apache Jena: http://jena.apache.org/; OpenXES: http://code.deckfour.org/xes/; caRML: https://github.com/carml/carml/; TopBraid: https://github.com/topquadrant/shacl.

  13. 13.

    http://graphdb.ontotext.com/.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially funded by the Austrian FFG grant 861213 (CitySPIN), the Austrian FWF/netidee SCIENCE grant P30437-N31 (SEPSES), the EU H2020 programme under MSCA-RISE agreement 645751 (RISE_BPM), the Christian Doppler Research Association, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs and the National Foundation for Research, Technology and Development.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. TU Wien, Favoritenstrasse 9-11, 1040, Vienna, Austria

    Fajar J. Ekaputra, Andreas Ekelhart & Elmar Kiesling

  2. WU Vienna, Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020, Vienna, Austria

    Claudio Di Ciccio & Alessio Cecconi

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  1. Claudio Di Ciccio
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  3. Alessio Cecconi
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Correspondence to Claudio Di Ciccio .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Cinzia Cappiello

  2. Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Marcela Ruiz

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Di Ciccio, C., Ekaputra, F.J., Cecconi, A., Ekelhart, A., Kiesling, E. (2019). Finding Non-compliances with Declarative Process Constraints Through Semantic Technologies. In: Cappiello, C., Ruiz, M. (eds) Information Systems Engineering in Responsible Information Systems. CAiSE 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 350. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21297-1_6

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