Business process analysis and integration are key endeavours for today's enterprises. Recently, Web services have been widely adopted for the implementation and integration of business processes within and across enterprises. In this dissertation, we investigate the problem of enabling the analysis of service interactions, in today's enterprises, in the context of business process executions, and that of service integration. Our study shows that only fraction of interactions in the enterprise are supported by process-aware systems. However, enabling above-mentioned analyses requires: (i) a model of the underlying business process to be used as a reference for the analysis, and (ii) the ability to correlate events generated during service interactions into process instances. We refer to a process model and the corresponding process instances as a "process view". We propose the concept of process space to refer to all process related information sources in the enterprise, over which various process views are defined. We propose the design and development of a system called "process space discovery system" (PSDS) for discovering process views in a process space. We introduce novel approaches for the correlation of events into process instances, focusing on the public processes of Web services (business protocols), and also for the discovery of the business protocol models from the process instances of a process view. Analysis of service integration approaches shows that while standardisation in Web services simplifies the integration in the communication level, at the higher levels of abstractions (e.g., services interfaces and protocol models) services are still open to heterogeneities. We characterise the mismatches between service interfaces and protocol specifications and introduce "mismatch patterns" to represent them. A mismatch pattern also includes an adapter template that aims at the resolution of the captured mismatch. We also propose semi-automated approaches for identifying the mismatches between interface and protocol specifications of two services. The proposed approaches have been implemented in prototype tools, and experimentally validated on synthetic and real-world datasets. The discovered process views, using PSDS, can be used to perform various analyses in an enterprise, and the proposed adaptation approach facilitates the adoption of Web services in business process integration.

Business process analysis and integration are key endeavours for today's enterprises. Recently, Web services have been widely adopted for the implementation and integration of business processes within and across enterprises. In this dissertation, we investigate the problem of enabling the analysis of service interactions, in today's enterprises, in the context of business process executions, and that of service integration. Our study shows that only fraction of interactions in the enterprise are supported by process-aware systems. However, enabling above-mentioned analyses requires: (i) a model of the underlying business process to be used as a reference for the analysis, and (ii) the ability to correlate events generated during service interactions into process instances. We refer to a process model and the corresponding process instances as a "process view". We propose the concept of process space to refer to all process related information sources in the enterprise, over which various process views are defined. We propose the design and development of a system called "process space discovery system" (PSDS) for discovering process views in a process space. We introduce novel approaches for the correlation of events into process instances, focusing on the public processes of Web services (business protocols), and also for the discovery of the business protocol models from the process instances of a process view. Analysis of service integration approaches shows that while standardisation in Web services simplifies the integration in the communication level, at the higher levels of abstractions (e.g., services interfaces and protocol models) services are still open to heterogeneities. We characterise the mismatches between service interfaces and protocol specifications and introduce "mismatch patterns" to represent them. A mismatch pattern also includes an adapter template that aims at the resolution of the captured mismatch. We also propose semi-automated approaches for identifying the mismatches between interface and protocol specifications of two services. The proposed approaches have been implemented in prototype tools, and experimentally validated on synthetic and real-world datasets. The discovered process views, using PSDS, can be used to perform various analyses in an enterprise, and the proposed adaptation approach facilitates the adoption of Web services in business process integration.

The success of Web services comes from the benefits that it brings in reducing the cost and the time needed to develop data and applications by reusing them, and simplifying their integrations through standardization. However, standardization in Web services does not remove the need for adapters due to possible heterogeneity among service interface and protocol definitions. Moreover, the current service APIs are targeted toward professional programmers, but not accessible to a wider class of users without programming expertise, but would never the less like to build their own integrated applications. In this dissertation, we propose methods and tools to support both service developers and non-expert users in their data and application integration tasks. To support service developers, we propose a framework that enables rapid development of Web service adapters. We investigate particularly the problem of service adaptation focusing on business interface and protocol layers. Our study shows that many differences between business interfaces and protocols are recurring. We introduce mismatch patterns to capture these recurring differences and provide solutions to resolve them. We present the notion of adaptation aspects, which is based on the aspect-oriented programming paradigm, to enable rapid development and deployment of service adapters. We also present a comparative study between standalone and aspect-oriented adapters development. The study shows that the aspect-oriented approach is preferable in many cases, especially when adapters need to access internal states of services. The proposed approach is implemented in a prototype tool, which is used to illustrate how it simplifies adapters development through a case study. To support users without programming expertise, we propose a spreadsheet-based Web mashups development framework, which enables users to develop mashups in the popular spreadsheet environment. First, we provide a mechanism that makes structured data first class values of spreadsheet cells. Second, we propose a new component model that can be used to develop fairly sophisticated mashups, involving joining data sources and keeping spreadsheet data up to date. Third, to simplify mashup development, we provide a collection of spreadsheet-based mashup patterns that captures common Web data access and spreadsheet presentation functionalities. Users can reuse and customize these patterns to build spreadsheet-based Web mashups instead of developing them from scratch. Fourth, we enable users to manipulate structured data presented on spreadsheet in a drag-and-drop fashion. Finally, we have developed and tested a prototype tool to demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework.

The success of Web services comes from the benefits that it brings in reducing the cost and the time needed to develop data and applications by reusing them, and simplifying their integrations through standardization. However, standardization in Web services does not remove the need for adapters due to possible heterogeneity among service interface and protocol definitions. Moreover, the current service APIs are targeted toward professional programmers, but not accessible to a wider class of users without programming expertise, but would never the less like to build their own integrated applications. In this dissertation, we propose methods and tools to support both service developers and non-expert users in their data and application integration tasks. To support service developers, we propose a framework that enables rapid development of Web service adapters. We investigate particularly the problem of service adaptation focusing on business interface and protocol layers. Our study shows that many differences between business interfaces and protocols are recurring. We introduce mismatch patterns to capture these recurring differences and provide solutions to resolve them. We present the notion of adaptation aspects, which is based on the aspect-oriented programming paradigm, to enable rapid development and deployment of service adapters. We also present a comparative study between standalone and aspect-oriented adapters development. The study shows that the aspect-oriented approach is preferable in many cases, especially when adapters need to access internal states of services. The proposed approach is implemented in a prototype tool, which is used to illustrate how it simplifies adapters development through a case study. To support users without programming expertise, we propose a spreadsheet-based Web mashups development framework, which enables users to develop mashups in the popular spreadsheet environment. First, we provide a mechanism that makes structured data first class values of spreadsheet cells. Second, we propose a new component model that can be used to develop fairly sophisticated mashups, involving joining data sources and keeping spreadsheet data up to date. Third, to simplify mashup development, we provide a collection of spreadsheet-based mashup patterns that captures common Web data access and spreadsheet presentation functionalities. Users can reuse and customize these patterns to build spreadsheet-based Web mashups instead of developing them from scratch. Fourth, we enable users to manipulate structured data presented on spreadsheet in a drag-and-drop fashion. Finally, we have developed and tested a prototype tool to demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework.