Abstract
Human-centric, ad-hoc, and dynamic semi-structured processes are common in today's business enterprises. The lifecycle of such processes is not necessarily driven by a formal process model and the execution of such processes may be very dynamic. Such processes may execute on heterogeneous platforms and involve the interchange of diverse documents and artifacts (E.g. emails, images, PDF attachments, videos, audio files, chat transcripts). Key problems that arise as a result of the proliferation of such processes include how to integrate unstructured data for semi-structured business processes from disparate sources and heterogeneous platforms (E.g. social networking platforms, heterogeneous databases, distributed legacy workflow engines). Further major challenges include mining data of such processes to enable modeling, optimization, prediction, collaboration and community management, and network analysis. The goal of the first international workshop on data management and analytics for semi-structured business processes (DMA4SP) is to investigate novel solutions to such problems, as well as create a forum to discuss emerging applications. © 2011 IEEE.