Most human centric business activities, like the handling of an insurance claim or the design of an IT solution, do not follow a formal process model word-by-word. While there are often underlying processes in place, the real business operation typically encompasses a wider scope of actions. It includes unstructured segments of human activities, additional documents and interactions, the integration of remote systems and services, and the reactions to exceptional situations. With the case management approach, the knowledge worker in the center takes control and acts as an orchestrator of available services rather than being a part of an assembly line. This paper presents how data-centric web services can be used to build a service-oriented case management application, and how advanced analytics can leverage historical information to improve the effectiveness of business processes execution.

In today's Web, many functionality-wise similar Web services are offered through heterogeneous interfaces (operation definitions) and business protocols (ordering constraints defined on legal operation invocation sequences). The typical approach to enable interoperation in such a heterogeneous setting is through developing adapters. There have been approaches for classifying possible mismatches between service interfaces and business protocols to facilitate adapter development. However, the hard job is that of identifying, given two service specifications, the actual mismatches between their interfaces and business protocols. In this paper we present novel techniques and a tool that provides semi-automated support for identifying and resolution of mismatches between service interfaces and protocols, and for generating adapter specification. We make the following main contributions: (i) we identify mismatches between service interfaces, which leads to finding mismatches of type of signature, merge/split, and extra/missing messages; (ii) we identify all ordering mismatches between service protocols and generate a tree, called mismatch tree, for mismatches that require developers' input for their resolution. In addition, we provide semi-automated support in analyzing the mismatch tree to help in resolving such mismatches. We have implemented the approach in a tool inside IBM WID (WebSphere Integration Developer). Our experiments with some real-world case studies show the viability of the proposed approach. The methods and tool are significant in that they considerably simplify the problem of adapting services so that interoperation is possible.