Improving business process retrieval using categorization and multimodal search

Enterprises use repositories of Business Processes to standardize and adapt their operations in order to reuse them for new functional requirements. However, a disorganized growth of these repositories have hampered the search of Business Processes which is fundamental for reusing them. In this paper an approach for organizing and searching Business Processes is proposed, which is composed of two phases: First, an automatic and semantic categorization phase to classify Business Processes based on their functionality, and second a multimodal search phase in order to rank Business Processes based on structural and textual features. The proposed approach was tested in an evaluation over a closed repository collaboratively built by 20 expert evaluators. Initially, evaluators were asked to rate categories assigned by our approach to each Business Process in order to assess our results against the user perspective. Later, evaluators were asked to compare six queries against the repository in order to obtain a set of relevant Business Processes for each query. With these results, precision, recall and F-measure were calculated to evaluate the relevance and ranking concordance of the proposed approach against state-of-the-art algorithms for Business Process similarity search. Additionally, we applied the Friedman and the Wilcoxon signed rank tests over the results obtained for each query over precision and F-measure in order to evaluate the statistically significance of these results. The results obtained demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach for categorizing and retrieving Business Processes. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.