An Execution Engine for Semantic Business Processes

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009

When creating execution-level process models from conceptual to-be process models, challenges are to find implementations for process activities and to use these implementations correctly. Carrying out these activities manually can be time consuming, since it involves searching in large service repositories and cycles of testing and re-designing. We present Maestro for BPMN, a tool that allows to annotate and automatically compose activities within business processes, and to verify the consistency of an annotated process.

網際網路技術學刊, 2007

Bridging the semantic gap between business process models and semantic Web services becomes increasingly important in order to help automating business process integration in large organizations. Traditional workflow languages (such as BPEL4WS) support the modeling of business processes as syntax based compositions of Web services. When such processes are exported as Web services they as well expose syntactical interfaces. These syntactical interfaces allow only static composition and hence limit interactions between ...

EMISA Forum, 2006

Abstract: BPEL is gaining increasing attention as a potential standard for the definition of executable business processes based on web services. This paper gives an overview of standardization efforts in the area of business process execution, of the main concepts of BPEL, and of its support in practice.

2006

Theory, Tools and Applications

The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) is an emerging standard for specifying the behaviour of Web services at different levels of details using business process modeling constructs. It represents a convergence between Web services and business process technology. This chapter introduces the main concepts and constructs of BPEL and illustrates them by means of a comprehensive example. In addition, the chapter reviews some perceived limitations of BPEL and discusses proposals to address perceived limitations of BPEL and discusses proposals to address these limitations. The chapter also considers the possibility of applying formal methods and Semantic Web technology to support the rigorous development of service-oriented processes using BPEL.

Bridging People and Software through Process Technology, 2005

SpringerReference, 2011

The WS-BPEL 2.0 specification [WS-BPEL 2.0] provides a language for formally describing business processes and business interaction protocols. WS-BPEL was designed to extend the Web Services interaction model to support business transactions. The WS-BPEL Primer is a non-normative document intended to provide an easy to read explanation of the WS-BPEL 2.0 specification. The goal of this document is to help readers understand the concepts and major components of the WS-BPEL language. This document will also assist readers in recognizing appropriate scenarios for using WS-BPEL. This document describes several features of WS-BPEL using examples and extensive references to the normative specification.

Packt Publishing Ltd

2003

In today's world of extreme competition, information exchange and efficient communication is the need of the day. This need for information exchange brings in another need, that which makes information selectively visible, and its visibility to be changed on the fly. Web Services are a new breed of web application and play a central role in the WWW, providing the above-mentioned requirements. The composition of these services enables application integration within and across organizational boundaries. The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is intended to enable portable business process definitions for WSDL based services. In this paper we describe the work done on a BPEL execution engine and editor developed for the .NET framework. We also describe how a graphical representation based on UML activity diagrams was used to visualise service compositions and how this can be adopted as the underlying model for Semantic Web service descriptions such as OWL-S.

2007

Abstract The Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL) is the de facto standard for describing workflow-like compositions of Web services, so-called Web service orchestrations. In this paper an ontology for executable BPEL processes is presented, which reflects both the natural language description and the syntax given in the specification. The ontology makes BPEL process models accessible at a semantic level and thus to intelligent queries and machine reasoning. Key words: BPM, BPEL, ontology, semantics, WSML

Semantic Web Processes

The Web coupled with contemporary E-commerce and E-services is enabling a new networked economy [1]. The scope of activities that processes span has moved from intra-enterprise workflows coordinating multiple applications, predefined inter-enterprise and B2B processes, to dynamically defined Web processes among cooperating organizations. Components of technical aspect of the solutions involve the technologies for information exchange (from EDI to XML), software componentization (from CORBA to Web Services), and workflow coordination and collaboration. Semantics is the new component to this mix, as observed at the Amicaola workshop [2], which could enable support both the scalability and increasingly more dynamic nature of these Web processes. To these Semantics-enabled and empowered Web processes we call Semantic Web Processes. This tutorial presents what can be achieved by symbiotic synthesis of two of the hottest R&D and technology application areas: Web services and the Semantic Web. It presents some of the promises and challenges in applying semantics to each of the steps in the Semantic Web Process lifecycle. In particular we present the role of semantics in annotation (Semantic Annotation of Web Services), discovery (Semantic Web Service Discovery), composition (Semantic Process Composition), process execution/enactment (Semantic Web Process Orchestration), and quality of service of Semantic Web Processes. We also review ongoing frameworks and initiatives such as Semantic Web Service Initiative (SWSI) and DAML-S, as well as results from key projects such as the METEOR-S which build upon research, technology and current standards in workflow processes, Semantic Web, Web services and simulation [6].

The Learnable Task Modeling Language (LTML) was developed by combining features of OWL, OWL-S, and PDDL, using a more compact and readable syntax than OWL/RDF to create human readable representations of web service procedures and hierarchical task models. Our goal was in part to develop a more robust and developer-friendly language based on the principles and design that led to OWL-S and demonstrate that such a language also provided the basis for developing tools that could learn web service procedures by demonstration. LTML's initial and driving use is as an interlingua for the learning and procedure execution components of POIROT, a system that learns web service workflow procedures from 'observations' of one or a small number of semantic web service traces. The LTML language uses an s-expression based syntax for improved readability but has parsers and generators that translate the surface forms into RDF for storage in a SESAME triple store implementing POIROT's internal blackboard. All language elements are grounded in a set of OWL ontologies. The language encompasses and extends coverage of the OWL-S process and grounding models, and introduces elements to support sets of hierarchical task methods indexed by goals, semantic execution traces, and internal tasks and learning goals. This short paper gives an overview of LTML and describes the areas where LTML diverges from or extends OWL-S and PDDL.

2006