Expressing Business Process Models as OWL-S Ontologies

BPEL4WS is a well-established business process standard that can be used to orchestrate service-based workflows. However, the rapid growth and automation demands of e-business and grid applications require BPEL4WS to provide enhanced semantic annotations to achieve the goal of business processes automation. Here, OWL-S (OWL for Web Services) is designed to represent such kind of semantic information. Furthermore, there exists a similarity in the conceptual model of OWL-S and BPEL4WS that can be employed to overcome the lack of semantics in BPEL4WS by mapping the BPEL4WS process model to the OWL-S suite of ontologies. The mapped OWL-S service can be used to increase flexibility and to automate BPEL based grid scenarios even further. This is achieved by dynamic discovery, composition and invocation of OWL-S services, for example within e-business and grid environments. Hence, the aim of this paper is to establish a mapping from the BPEL process model to the complete OWL-S suite of ontologies. We present a mapping strategy and a tool supporting this strategy. This allows the semantic annotation of workflows defined as BPEL4WS processes to enable the automation of a variety of e-business tasks. Publication Details This paper was originally published as: Aslam, MA, Auer, S, Shen, J & Hermann, M, Expressing Business Process Model as OWL-S Ontologies, in Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Grid and Peerto-Peer based Workflows (GPWW 2006) in conjunction with the 4th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2006), Vienna, Austria, September 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4103, Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg, 2006, 400-415. The original publication can be found here. This conference paper is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/infopapers/439 Expressing Business Process Models as OWL-S Ontologies Muhammad Ahtisham Aslam, Sören Auer, Jun Shen, Michael Herrmann 1 Betriebliche Informationsysteme, Universität Leipzig, Germany {aslam,auer}@informatik.uni-leipzig.de 2 Computer and Information Science Department, University of Pennsylvania, USA [email protected] 3 School of IT and CS, University of Wollongong, Australia [email protected] 4 DaimlerChrysler AG, Sindelfingen Germany [email protected] Abstract. BPEL4WS is a well-established business process standard that can be used to orchestrate service-based workflows. However, the rapid growth and automation demands of e-business and grid applications require BPEL4WS to provide enhanced semantic annotations to achieve the goal of business processes automation. Here, OWL-S (OWL for Web Services) is designed to represent such BPEL4WS is a well-established business process standard that can be used to orchestrate service-based workflows. However, the rapid growth and automation demands of e-business and grid applications require BPEL4WS to provide enhanced semantic annotations to achieve the goal of business processes automation. Here, OWL-S (OWL for Web Services) is designed to represent such kind of semantic information. Furthermore, there exists a similarity in the conceptual model of OWL-S and BPEL4WS that can be employed to overcome the lack of semantics in BPEL4WS by mapping the BPEL4WS process model to the OWL-S suite of ontologies. The mapped OWL-S service can be used to increase flexibility and to automate BPEL based grid scenarios even further. This is achieved by dynamic discovery, composition and invocation of OWL-S services, for example within e-business and grid environments. Hence, the aim of this paper is to establish a mapping from the BPEL process model to the complete OWL-S suite of ontologies. We present a mapping strategy and a tool supporting this strategy. This allows the semantic annotation of workflows defined as BPEL4WS processes to enable the automation of a variety of e-business tasks.