Semantic Interoperability in Interorganizational Workflows

Most workkow model and systems only support the separate and independent execution of business processes. However, processes often need to interact with each other, by synchronizing the execution of their activities and by exchanging process relevant data; in particular, activities which are performed in the context of a process may need to innuence activities of a diierent process in a way that, laying \between" the two processes, is quite diicult to design, formalize, and understand. These problems particularly occur when processes are executed in diierent organizations, and are managed by diierent systems. In this paper we propose a workkow model that allows for a exible semantic workkow interoperability, enabling the cooperation among interorganizational workkows; we extend traditional workkow conceptual models by allowing workkows to publish and subscribe to events, and by enabling the deenition of nodes in the process execution where events should be sent or received, along with event parameters that provide for data exchange between workkows. We then present how events can be dispatched in a multi-organizational context, and nally we discuss some properties related to the analysis of interacting workkows.