Analysis of business process integration in Web service context

Abstract

The integration of Web services is a recent outgrowth of the Business Process integration field that will require powerful meta-schema matching mechanisms supported by higher level abstractions, such as UML metamodels. Currently, there are many XML-based workflow process specification languages (e.g. XPDL, BPEL) which can be used to define business processes in the Web services and Grid Computing world. However, with limited capability to describe the relationships (schemas or ontologies) between process objects, the dominant use of XML as a meta-data markup language makes the semantics of the processes ambiguous. OWL-S (Ontology Web Language for Services) exploits the semantic description power of OWL to build an ontology language for services. It therefore becomes a candidate for an inter lingua. In this paper, we propose an integration framework for business processes, which is applied to Web services defined in OWL-S. KeywordsBusiness process management, Web services, Semantic web, Specification integration, UML meta-models Disciplines Physical Sciences and Mathematics Publication DetailsThis article will be published as: Shen, J, Grossman, G, AbstractThe integration of Web services is a recent outgrowth of the Business Process integration field that will require powerful meta-schema matching mechanisms supported by higher level abstractions, such as UML meta-models. Currently, there are many XML based workflow process specification languages (e.g. XPDL, BPEL) which can be used to define business processes in the Web services and Grid Computing world. However, with limited capability to describe the relationships (schemas or ontologies) between process objects, the dominant use of XML as a meta-data markup language makes the semantics of the processes ambiguous. OWL-S (Ontology Web Language for Services) exploits the semantic description power of OWL to build an ontology language for services. It therefore becomes a candidate for an inter lingua. In this paper, we propose an integration framework for business processes which is applied to Web services defined in OWL-S. We first describe the mapping from BPEL to OWL-S and what semantic relationships between Web services look like in OWL-S. Based on these relationships, integration options are applied which create a new composite Web service semi-automatically.

The new supply chain's frontier: Information management

“…In fact, the Web Services pattern is becoming the dominant form of distributed computing (Shen et al, 2007). These authors also cite a survey, from a global consultancy across 20 vertical industries, which estimates that 75% of companies with revenues ranging from a million dollars to more than $1 billion have already deployed one or more Web Services.…”

Easy web service discovery: A query-by-example approach

“…and then use semantic matching algorithms [24] to find the required services. By exploiting these unambiguous definitions and semantic matching, software agents can automate the process of seeking, accessing and composing services [25,26,16,27]. Nevertheless, building ontologies has been identified as a costly, time-consuming, tedious and error prone task [17,18].…”

A Web services and process-view combined approach for process management of collaborative product development

“…A BPEL4WS process definition uses one or more WSDL services, and provides the description of the behavior and interaction of a process instance relative to its partners and resources through WSs interface [34]. BPEL4WS is utilized to describe the entire CPD process by composing suitable WSs in this paper.…”