Towards Semantic Business Processes: Concepts, Methodology and Implementation

The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS (shortly BPEL)) is one of the most popular languages and a de facto standard for modelling business processes as Web services compositions. However, it only allows using hard-coded syntactical interfaces for partners and the process itself, i.e. semantic descriptions of services cannot be used within a process model. The lack of an ontological description of the process elements cause limitations in the ways services are used within a process. A service providing the same functionality as the one referenced in the process model, but via a different syntactical interface, cannot be used instead. As a result, a process model cannot find an alternate service that performs the same functionality but exposes a different interface, and can crash. Also, another drawback of such business processes is that they expose syntactical interfaces and cannot be discovered and composed dynamically by other semantic enabled systems slowing down the process of interaction between business partners. OWL-S on the other hand is a suite of OWL ontologies and can be used to describe the compositions of Web services on the basis of matching semantics as well as to expose semantically enriched interfaces of business processes as OWL-S composite services. Consequently, translating BPEL process descriptions to the OWL-S suite of ontologies can overcome the syntactical limitations of BPEL processes enabling them to 1) edit and model the composition of We