Skip to main content

Towards Measuring Process Model Granularity via Natural Language Analysis

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Business Process Management Workshops (BPM 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 171))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Nowadays business process modeling is an integral part of many organizations to document and redesign complex organizational processes. Particularly due to the large number of process models, quality assurance represents an important issue in many organizations. While many quality aspects are well understood and can be automatically checked with existing tools, there is currently no possibility to support modelers in maintaining a consistent degree of granularity. In this paper, we leverage natural language analysis in process models to introduce a novel set of metrics that indicate the granularity of process models. We evaluate the proposed metrics using two hierarchically organized process model collections from practice. Statistical tests demonstrate the expressive power of the proposed metrics.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    see Oxford Online Dictionary for granularity and granular.

References

  1. Kettinger, W., Teng, J., Guha, S.: Business process change: a study of methodologies, techniques, and tools. MIS Quarterly 21, 55–80 (1997)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Rosemann, M.: Potential pitfalls of process modeling: part A. Bus. Process Manage. J. 12(2), 249–254 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Malinova, M., Leopold, H., Mendling, J.: An empirical investigation on the design of process architectures. In: Wirtschaftsinformatik, p. 75 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Dijkman, R., Vanderfeesten, I., Reijers, H.A.: The road to a business process architecture: an overview of approaches and their use. Technical report, Working Paper WP-350, Eindhoven University of Technology (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Becker, J., Mühlen, M.: Towards a classification framework for application granularity in workflow management systems. In: Jarke, M., Oberweis, A. (eds.) CAiSE 1999. LNCS, vol. 1626, pp. 411–416. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Becker, J., Rosemann, M., Uthmann, C.: Guidelines of business process modeling. In: van der Aalst, W.M.P., Desel, J., Oberweis, A. (eds.) Business Process Management. LNCS, vol. 1806, pp. 30–49. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  7. Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Seven process modeling guidelines (7PMG). Inf. Softw. Technol. 52(2), 127–136 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Krogstie, J., Sindre, G., Jørgensen, H.: Process models representing knowledge for action: a revised quality framework. Eur. J. Inf. Syst. 15(1), 91–102 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Zadeh, L.A.: Toward a theory of fuzzy information granulation and its centrality in human reasoning and fuzzy logic. Fuzzy Sets Syst. 90(2), 111–127 (1997)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  10. Henderson-Sellers, B., Gonzalez-Perez, C.: Granularity in conceptual modelling: application to metamodels. In: Parsons, J., Saeki, M., Shoval, P., Woo, C., Wand, Y. (eds.) ER 2010. LNCS, vol. 6412, pp. 219–232. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Krammer, A., Heinrich, B., Henneberger, M., Lautenbacher, F.: Granularity of services. Bus. Inf. Syst. Eng. 3(6), 345–358 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Heinrich, B., Zimmermann, S.: Granularity metrics for it services. In: ICIS’12, pp. 1–19 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Kulkarni, N., Dwivedi, V.: The role of service granularity in a successful soa realization - a case study. In: SERVICES ’08, pp. 423–430 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Ma, Q., Zhou, N., Zhu, Y., Wang, H.: Evaluating service identification with design metrics on business process decomposition. In: SCC ’09, pp. 160–167 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Wang, Z.J., Zhan, D.C., Xu, X.F.: STCIM: a dynamic granularity oriented and stability based component identification method. SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes 31(3), 1–14 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. He, B., Ounis, I.: Inferring query performance using pre-retrieval predictors. In: Apostolico, A., Melucci, M. (eds.) SPIRE 2004. LNCS, vol. 3246, pp. 43–54. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Plachouras, V., Cacheda, F., Ounis, I., Rijsbergen, C.J.V.: University of glasgow at the web track: dynamic application of hyperlink analysis using the query scope. In: TREC’03, pp. 636–642 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Yan, X., Lau, R.Y., Song, D., Li, X., Ma, J.: Toward a semantic granularity model for domain-specific information retrieval. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 29(3), 1–46 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Allen, R.B., Wu, Y.: Generality of texts. In: Lim, E., Foo, S.S.-B., Khoo, Ch., Chen, H., Fox, E., Urs, S.R., Costantino, T. (eds.) ICADL 2002. LNCS, vol. 2555, pp. 111–116. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Allen, R.B., Wu, Y.: Metrics for the scope of a collection: research articles. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 56(12), 1243–1249 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Holschke, O., Rake, J., Levina, O.: Granularity as a cognitive factor in the effectiveness of business process model reuse. In: Dayal, U., Eder, J., Koehler, J., Reijers, H.A. (eds.) BPM 2009. LNCS, vol. 5701, pp. 245–260. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Leopold, H.: Natural language in business process models. Ph.D. thesis, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Leopold, H., Smirnov, S., Mendling, J.: On the refactoring of activity labels in business process models. Inf. Syst. 37(5), 443–459 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Bieswanger, M., Becker, A.: Introduction to English Linguistics. UTB für Wissenschaft: Uni-Taschenbücher. Francke (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Leopold, H., Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A.: On the automatic labeling of process models. In: Mouratidis, H., Rolland, C. (eds.) CAiSE 2011. LNCS, vol. 6741, pp. 512–520. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Friedrich, F.: Measuring semantic label quality using wordnet. In: EPK, pp. 7–21 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Resnik, P.: Using information content to evaluate semantic similarity in a taxonomy. In: IJCAI’95, pp. 448–453 (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Seco, N., Veale, T., Hayes, J.: An intrinsic information content metric for semantic similarity in WordNet. Proc. of ECAI 4, 1089–1090 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Miller, G.A.: WordNet: a lexical database for english. Commun. ACM 38(11), 39–41 (1995)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Keller, G., Teufel, T.: SAP(R) R/3 process oriented implementation: iterative process prototyping. Addison-Wesley, Boston (1998)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Henrik Leopold .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Leopold, H., Pittke, F., Mendling, J. (2014). Towards Measuring Process Model Granularity via Natural Language Analysis. In: Lohmann, N., Song, M., Wohed, P. (eds) Business Process Management Workshops. BPM 2013. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 171. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06257-0_33

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06257-0_33

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-06256-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-06257-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics