The discovery, representation and reconstruction of Business Networks (BN)įrom Network Mining (NM) raw data is a difficult problem for enterprises. We comprehensively define the domain and discuss a system implementation, which we evaluated in a real-world customer case. That means automatic discovery, mining and inference capabilities are combined with expert knowledge from different domains to compute the networks and a semantic correlation between entities of different perspectives. For that, we extend the Network Mining (NM) domain by a virtualized network approach towards a BNM. In this position paper, we introduce the new domain of Business Network Management (BNM), which strives to make business networks visible within network views and sets them into context with each other. However, this information is hidden in complex, dynamic and heterogeneous enterprise domains.
The insight into these networks promise a competitive advantage through the visibility into the linked enterprise data.
These business process networks run on (technical) integration networks, which are semantically interlinked with the processes, while both are correlated to organizational (social) networks, consisting of technical and business domain experts. Enterprises are part of value chains consisting of cross-enterprise business processes forming large business networks of customers, vendors, partners and competitors.