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3 An Automatic Approach to Generate Process Names
In this section we present an automatic approach for the generation of process
model names, which builds on the strategies identified in the previous section.
The main idea of the approach is to derive a set of potentially useful names for a
given process model based on its activities and events. Subsequently, a modeler
can select the most suitable name.
We organize our approach in three steps. Phase 1 serves as preparation for
the main information extraction. In this phase all activities, start events and end
events of the given process model are annotated with their respective action and
business object. For this step, we use an algorithm for automatically identifying
action and business objects from activity labels as presented in [9], and extended
it with a capability to analyze different start and end event structures as defined
in [10]. In Phase 3, the name candidates are transformed automatically to the
verb-object style based on the techniques defined in [9]. In the following subsec-
tions, we introduce the specific techniques to generate the different proposals in
Phase 2, as well as their interdependence. All of these assume that annotations
of actions and business objects are available from Phase 1. The reader may wish
to refer to [11] for the pseudo algorithms that abstract from our implementation
in Java.
The
Dominating Element Extraction
technique investigates whether the given
process model includes a dominating action and dominating business object.
Therefore, for each element type, i.e. action or business object, the occurrence
of the elements among all activities of the model is checked. If there exists an
element that has a higher occurrence than all other elements among this type,
it is saved as dominating element. If a dominating element has been identified,
it can be used as input for the
Subordinate Element Extraction
technique. In
case no dominating element could be detected, the further steps are limited to
executing the
Event Extraction
and the
Main Activity Extraction
techniques,
which do not require the input of a dominating element.
If one type of dominant element was detected, the
Subordinate Element Ex-
traction
technique identifies those actions or business objects with which the
dominant element is connected in the given process model. Therefore, all ac-
tivities containing the dominating element are scanned and the complementing
element is both extracted and saved to a list of subordinate elements. If, for in-
stance, the dominating action
analyze
was derived from the two activities
Order
Analysis
and
Program Analysis
, the subordinate elements are given by the busi-
ness objects
order
and
program
. Hence, all activities containing the dominating
element are selected and the subordinate elements are derived.
We introduce two techniques for constructing a process name based on the set
of subordinate elements and the dominating element:
Lexical Conjunction
and
Logical Conjunction
. In case of the Lexical Conjunction the subordinate actions
or business objects are replaced with a newly introduced element. In partic-
ular, the lexical database WordNet is consulted to detect common
holonyms
and
hypernyms
of the subordinate elements. If a proper holonym - a word
that is more generic than a given word - or a hypernym is found - a word
