Handling transactional business services.

This article discusses the handling of transactional business services, which are service compositions that orchestrate and coordinate underlying services to process a high-level business activity. The main contribution made in this article is the presentation of the pattern TBS handler, which describes how one can implement a transactional business service (TBS). This pattern functions as an overview pattern for a complete pattern language that is outlined in the text. This pattern language provides the appropriate ingredients for the implementation of a TBS. It is presented using thumbnails.

A conceptual architecture for semantic web services development and deployment

Several extensions of the Web Services Framework (WSF) have been proposed. The combination with Semantic Web technologies introduces a notion of semantics, which can enhance scalability through automation. Service composition to processes is an equally important issue. Ontology technology – the core of the Semantic Web – can be the central building block of an extension endeavour. We present a conceptual architecture for ontology-based Web service development and deployment. The development of service-based software systems within the WSF is gaining increasing importance. We show how ontologies can integrate models, languages, infrastructure, and activities within this architecture to support reuse and composition of semantic Web services

An ontological framework for web service processes

The process notion is central in computing. Business processes and workflow processes are essential elements of software systems implementations. Processes are connected to notions of interaction and composition. The Web Services Framework as a development and deployment platform for services is based on the assembly of interacting processes as the compositional paradigm. Service-based software development on and for the Web platform embracing the philosophy of discovering and using third-party services makes a shared knowledge representation framework necessary. We develop a semantical and ontological framework for service process composition. We propose a framework for the compositional de�nition of Web services based on the �-calculus to de�ne protocol-like restrictions on service interactions and based on description logic and ontologies to guide the discovery and modelling of services and processes

Protocol-based business process modeling and enactment

Business processes are conventionally modeled as monolithic flows that capture the desired business logic. However, developing process flows is challenging. Because a flow specifies what its participants should do, it restricts the autonomy of its participants, thus limiting their ability to exploit opportunities or accommodate exceptions according to their business preferences. We take a dual perspective wherein business processes are modeled as compositions of (instantiated) business protocols. Each business protocol specifies interactions among its partners; each protocol serves a unique business purpose, e.g., processing a payment or shipping an item. Thus, modularizing a monolithic business process via business protocols allows clear separation of concerns for modeling and enacting the process. We develop an approach in which protocols are compiled into local skeletal flows for each participant that can be fleshed out with local business logic as needed. Such flows are naturally distributed but can be enacted using commercial business flow engines. Thus, our protocol-based approach combines the benefit of improved modeling with simplified implementations. 1