Semantic Modeling of Services and Workflows for German Grid Projects

Many projects in academia and industry nowadays use and provide services electronically in order to be able to select from or target to a larger community across regional boundaries. With increasing demand for and supply of complex services, it has become difficult to find and compose appropriate services. The formal description of services and workflows facilitates users in finding appropriate services for a task at hand, to embed them into dynamic workflows or simply to get informed about interesting new services provided by the system. In this paper we present an approach for modeling services and workflows semantically. The modeling language captures basic properties of services and workflows including their functionality modeled formally as a process, while the Web browser based graphical editor allows users to model their services and workflows in an easy fashion. We present an example scenario in which a workflow composed out of services from the logistics domain is modeled. The scenario illustrates the description formalism and basic features of our description language and reveals how it can be applied to further projects linked with other activities within the German Grid Community.