Semantic Business Process Modeling

This book presents a process-oriented business modeling framework based on semantic technologies. The framework consists of modeling languages, methods, and tools that allow for semantic modeling of business motivation, business policies and rules, and business processes. Quality of the proposed modeling framework is evaluated based on the modeling content of SAP Solution Composer and several real-world business scenarios

Web service composition : architecture, frameworks, and techniques

OASIS defines Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. One approach to realize SOA is Web services. A Web service is a software system that has a machine processable Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interface; other systems interact with it using SOAP messages in a manner prescribed by its description. Descriptions enable Web services to be discovered, used by other Web services, and composed into new Web services. Composition is a mechanism for rapid creation of new Web services by reusing existing ones. Web services have functional, behavioral, semantic, and non-functional characteristics. These characteristics have to be considered for composition, as they provide essential information about the services. In order to compose Web services with these characteristics, they have to be described appropriately. However, the existing techniques do not consider all these aspects together for description and composition. This thesis proposes a business model, also referred to as architecture, a description framework, and a composition framework for Web service composition. Techniques for matching, categorizing, and assembling the composite services are also proposed as a part of the composition framework. The architecture, frameworks, and techniques describe, discover, manipulate, and compose Web services by taking into account all their characteristics. The standard Web service business model is extended by the proposed business model to support Web service composition. In the model, based on their demand, the requested Web services are composed by the Web service composer. In the proposed architecture, Web services are described using the description framework languages. The proposed framework combines Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema (SAWSDL) for functional and semantic description, Message Sequence Charts (MSC) for behavioral description, and a simple and new Non Functional Specification Language (NFSL) for the non-functional properties description of Web services. It uses Higher Order Logic (HOL) for formalizing and integrating the three languages. The role of Web service composer in the architecture is realized by the composition framework. It essentially defines the architecture of the composer. In this framework, matchmaking, categorization, and assembly techniques are used to create the requested composite service. These techniques manipulate the Web services at HOL-level. The formal matchmaking technique discovers the primitive Web services by using a HOL theorem prover. The categorization and the assembly techniques manipulate the matched services and orchestrate the composite service. The concepts of the model, frameworks, and techniques are implemented, and their working is illustrated using case studies. Prototypes of the model's components (extended registry and extended requester) and the composition framework are developed, and their performance is analyzed. Case studies to illustrate the description and the composition frameworks are also presente

Effective decision support for semantic web service selection

The objective of this dissertation is to demonstrate the feasibility of the vision of the Internet of Services based on Semantic Web Services by suggesting an approach to end-user mediated Semantic Web Service selection. Our main contribution is an incremental and interactive approach to requirements elicitation and service selection that is inspired by example critiquing recommender systems. It alternates phases of intermediate service recommendation and phases of informal requirements specification. During that process, the user incrementally develops his service requirements and preferences and finally makes a selection decision. We demonstrate how the requirements elicitation and service selection process can be directed and focused to effectively reduce the system's uncertainty about the user's service requirements and thus to contribute to the efficiency of the service selection process. To acquire information about the actual performance of available services and thus about the risk that is associated with their execution, we propose a flexible feedback system, that leverages reported consumer experiences made in past service interactions. In particular, we provide means that allow to detailedly describe a service's performance with respect to its multiple facets. This is supplemented by a user-adaptive method that effectively assists service consumers in providing such feedback as well as a privacy-preserving technique for feedback propagation. We also demonstrate that available consumer feedback can be effectively exploited to assess the degree and kind of risk that is associated with the execution of an offered service and show how the user can be effectively made aware of this risk. In contrast to many other approaches related to Semantic Web Service technology, we performed an extensive and thorough evaluation of our contribution and documented its results. These show the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach