Managing Business Process Models: A Private UDDI Application Study

摘要

In today's e-business environment, business process modeling is playing an important role in many application domains, such as Business Process Integration, Business Process Re-engineering, and Business Process Management. As a result, Business Process Models (BPMs) become the essential business assets in an organization entity, which need to be effectively managed in order to be reused by internal users and to be exchanged or studied by external partners. BPM{sub}2 have these features: customized categorization, web-avalability, and security. On the other hand, private UDDI, as an universal service registry, is capable of powerful categorization and multi-category-based inquiry but lack access control. To conduct effective BPM{sub}2, this paper proposes a new application mode of private UDDI, called secure universal catalog UDDI, which not only satisfies the BPM{sub}2 requirements by leveraging private UDDI's capabilities but also explores a new use case for private UDDI. In this BPM{sub}2 approach, any information can be published into private UDDI instead of web services, and access control can be added to support secure acquirement of BPMs. A proof of concept is therefore implemented for BPM{sub}2 in this paper. Both advantages and disadvantages are discussed and some recommendations are given for future UDDI specification enhancement accordingly.