Specifying, Discovering, and Monitoring Service Flows: Making Web Services Process-Aware

BPEL has emerged as the de-facto standard for implementing processes based on web services while formal languages like Petri nets have been proposed as an “academic response” allowing for all kinds of analysis. However, both are rather procedural and this does not fit well with the autonomous nature of services. Therefore, we propose DecSerFlow as a Declarative Service Flow Language. Moreover, we link this language to process mining where we focus on process discovery and conformance testing. This makes it possible to uncover processes emerging in a service-oriented architecture. Moreover, it can be used to expose services that do not follow the rules of the game.