Discovery and Analysis of Processes in Virtual Enterprises

Chris Jensen and Walt Scacchi Institute for Software Research School of Information and Computer Science University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA USA 92697-3425 {cjensen, wscacchi}@ics.uci.edu August 2003 (submitted for review) Abstract Intelligence informatics has led to techniques for mining Web data, but it has yet to relate how we can combine usage, content, tool, and resource data discovered from online information spaces into enterprise processes. Intelligence and security agencies may operate as virtual enterprises that perform such processes. This paper addresses the discovery and analysis of processes operating within virtual enterprises. The process discovery method employs a process meta-model to organize and filter information gathered from the public information space of a virtual enterprise. This gives rise to construction of an informal flow-graph model, semistructured rich hypermedia model, and a formal computationally enactable model of the process being analyzed.