Bridging the Semantic Gap between Business Processes and Semantic Web Services

Abstract

Bridging the semantic gap between business process models and semantic Web services becomes increasingly important in order to help automating business process integration in large organizations. Traditional workflow languages (such as BPEL4WS) support the modeling of business processes as syntax based compositions of Web services. When such processes are exported as Web services they as well expose syntactical interfaces. These syntactical interfaces allow only static composition and hence limit interactions between business partners. The obstacles of syntax based integration and composition can be addressed by enhancing business processes with semantics. This enables us to 1) edit and model the compositions of Web services on the basis of matching semantics 2) provide semantically enriched descriptions of business processes. In particular, it will support the dynamic and automated discovery, invocation and composition of business processes as semantic Web services. In this paper we present a mapping strategy that helps to overcome the syntactical limitations of BPEL processes by presenting them as OWL-S semantic Web services. The proposed strategy supports the mapping of BPEL process descriptions to complete OWL-S suit e of ontologies (i.e. Profile, Process Model and Grounding ontologies). A prototypical implementation of the proposed approach has also been presented.