Towards integration of business processes and semantic web services

Business processes are modeled as syntax based compositions of multiple services to perform tasks that a single Web service alone can not perform. When these processes are exported as services they have same syntactical limitations as traditional WSDL services resulting in clampdown for their dynamic discovery, invocation and composition by other semantic enabled systems. Successfully translating existing business processes to semantic Web services can help to address syntactical limitations of business processes and enabling them for semantic based composition editing, modeling and for dynamic discovery, invocation and composition by other semantic enabled systems. The aim of this thesis is to bridge the semantic gap between business processes and semantic Web services. Bridging the semantic gap between business processes and semantic Web services can help 1) to edit and model the compositions of Web services on the basis of matching semantics 2) to expose semantically enriched interfaces of business processes that can be used for dynamic and automated discovery, invocation and composition of business processes as semantic Web services. The approach presented in this thesis describes solutions for bridging the semantic gap between syntax based and semantic based composition of Web services both at architectural as well as technical levels. To meet architectural requirements, a new 4-tier semantic Web service integration and composition architecture has been presented. The proposed 4-tier architecture addresses issues like developing domain ontologies, describing semantics of Web services, interfacing between different layers of integration architecture and semantic enhancements in Web service related machinery (e.g. UDDI). The approach presented in this thesis uses upcoming semantic Web service language (i.e. OWLS) to address syntactical limitations of traditional business process modeling language (i.e. BPEL) by mapping BPEL processes to OWLS services. The Process Model ontology of OWLS suite is used to define the semantic based composition of services by translating BPEL process model (which is syntax based composition of Web services) to OWLS composite process (which is semantic based composition of Web services). Each Web service operation with in a BPEL process model is translated to an OWLS atomic process and the resulting OWLS composite service is composition of these atomic processes with defined control and data flow. The Profile ontology of mapped OWLS service can be used to expose semantically enriched interface of the BPEL process as OWLS service. This semantically enriched interface can be used