Business Process Retrieval Based on Behavioral Semantics

This paper develops a framework for retrieving business processes considering search requirements based on behavioral semantics properties; it presents a framework called "BeMantics" for retrieving business processes based on structural, linguistics, and behavioral semantics properties. The relevance of the framework is evaluated retrieving business processes from a repository, and collecting a set of relevant business processes manually issued by human judges. The "BeMantics" framework scored high precision values (0.717) but low recall values (0.558), which implies that even when the framework avoided false negatives, it prone to false positives. The highest pre- cision value was scored in the linguistic criterion showing that using semantic inference in the tasks comparison allowed to reduce around 23.6 % the number of false positives. Using semantic inference to compare tasks of business processes can improve the precision; but if the ontologies are from narrow and specific domains, they limit the semantic expressiveness obtained with ontologies from more general domains. Regarding the perform- ance, it can be improved by using a filter phase which indexes business processes taking into account behavioral semantics propertie

A Framework for Dynamic Web Services Composition

Dynamic composition of web services is a promising approach and at the same time a challenging research area for the dissemination of service-oriented applications. It is widely recognised that service semantics is a key element for the dynamic composition of Web services, since it allows the unambiguous descriptions of a service's capabilities and parameters. This paper introduces a framework for performing dynamic service composition by exploiting the semantic matchmaking between service parameters (i.e., outputs and inputs) to enable their interconnection and interaction. The basic assumption of the framework is that matchmaking enables finding semantic compatibilities among independently defined service descriptions. We also developed a composition algorithm that follows a semantic graph-based approach, in which a graph represents service compositions and the nodes of this graph represent semantic connections between services. Moreover, functional and non-functional properties of services are considered, to enable the computation of relevant and most suitable service compositions for some service request. The suggested end-to-end functional level service composition framework is illustrated with a realistic application scenario from the IST SPICE project

Business integration models in the context of web services.

E-commerce development and applications have been bringing the Internet to business and marketing and reforming our current business styles and processes. The rapid development of the Web, in particular, the introduction of the semantic web and web service technologies, enables business processes, modeling and management to enter an entirely new stage. Traditional web based business data and transactions can now be analyzed, extracted and modeled to discover new business rules and to form new business strategies, let alone mining the business data in order to classify customers or products. In this paper, we investigate and analyze the business integration models in the context of web services using a micro-payment system because a micro-payment system is considered to be a service intensive activity, where many payment tasks involve different forms of services, such as payment method selection for buyers, security support software, product price comparison, etc. We will use the micro-payment case to discuss and illustrate how the web services approaches support and transform the business process and integration model.

Integrating Distributed Sources of Information for Construction Cost Estimating using Semantic Web and Semantic Web Service technologies

A construction project requires collaboration of several organizations such as owner, designer, contractor, and material supplier organizations. These organizations need to exchange information to enhance their teamwork. Understanding the information received from other organizations requires specialized human resources. Construction cost estimating is one of the processes that requires information from several sources including a building information model (BIM) created by designers, estimating assembly and work item information maintained by contractors, and construction material cost data provided by material suppliers. Currently, it is not easy to integrate the information necessary for cost estimating over the Internet. This paper discusses a new approach to construction cost estimating that uses Semantic Web technology. Semantic Web technology provides an infrastructure and a data modeling format that enables accessing, combining, and sharing information over the Internet in a machine processable format. The estimating approach presented in this paper relies on BIM, estimating knowledge, and construction material cost data expressed in a web ontology language. The approach presented in this paper makes the various sources of estimating data accessible as Simple Protocol and Resource Description Framework Query Language (SPARQL) endpoints or Semantic Web Services. We present an estimating application that integrates distributed information provided by project designers, contractors, and material suppliers for preparing cost estimates. The purpose of this paper is not to fully automate the estimating process but to streamline it by reducing human involvement in repetitive cost estimating activities

NLSC: Unrestricted Natural Language-based Service Composition through Sentence Embeddings

Current approaches for service composition (assemblies of atomic services) require developers to use: (a) domain-specific semantics to formalize services that restrict the vocabulary for their descriptions, and (b) translation mechanisms for service retrieval to convert unstructured user requests to strongly-typed semantic representations. In our work, we argue that effort to developing service descriptions, request translations, and matching mechanisms could be reduced using unrestricted natural language; allowing both: (1) end-users to intuitively express their needs using natural language, and (2) service developers to develop services without relying on syntactic/semantic description languages. Although there are some natural language-based service composition approaches, they restrict service retrieval to syntactic/semantic matching. With recent developments in Machine learning and Natural Language Processing, we motivate the use of Sentence Embeddings by leveraging richer semantic representations of sentences for service description, matching and retrieval. Experimental results show that service composition development effort may be reduced by more than 44\% while keeping a high precision/recall when matching high-level user requests with low-level service method invocations.Comment: This paper will appear on SCC'19 (IEEE International Conference on Services Computing) on July 1

Semantic Description, Publication and Discovery of Workflows in myGrid

The bioinformatics scientific process relies on in silico experiments, which are experiments executed in full in a computational environment. Scientists wish to encode the designs of these experiments as workflows because they provide minimal, declarative descriptions of the designs, overcoming many barriers to the sharing and re-use of these designs between scientists and enable the use of the most appropriate services available at any one time. We anticipate that the number of workflows will increase quickly as more scientists begin to make use of existing workflow construction tools to express their experiment designs. Discovery then becomes an increasingly hard problem, as it becomes more difficult for a scientist to identify the workflows relevant to their particular research goals amongst all those on offer. While many approaches exist for the publishing and discovery of services, there have been few attempts to address where and how authors of experimental designs should advertise the availability of their work or how relevant workflows can be discovered with minimal effort from the user. As the users designing and adapting experiments will not necessarily have a computer science background, we also have to consider how publishing and discovery can be achieved in such a way that they are not required to have detailed technical knowledge of workflow scripting languages. Furthermore, we believe they should be able to make use of others' expert knowledge (the semantics) of the given scientific domain. In this paper, we define the issues related to the semantic description, publishing and discovery of workflows, and demonstrate how the architecture created by the myGrid project aids scientists in this process. We give a walk-through of how users can construct, publish, annotate, discover and enact workflows via the user interfaces of the myGrid architecture; we then describe novel middleware protocols, making use of the Semantic Web technologies RDF and OWL to support workflow publishing and discovery

Sustainable Design of Buildings using Semantic BIM and Semantic Web Services

In response to the growing concerns about climate change and the environment, sustainable design of buildings is increasingly demanded by building owners and users. However, fast evaluation of various design options and identification of the optimized design requires application of design analysis tools such as energy modeling, daylight simulations, and natural ventilation analysis software. Energy analysis requires access to distributed sources of information such as building element material properties provided by designers, mechanical equipment information provided by equipment manufacturers, weather data provided by weather reporting agencies, and energy cost data from energy providers. Gathering energy related information from different sources and inputting the information to an energy analysis application is a time consuming process. This causes delays and increases the time for comparing different design alternatives. This paper discusses how Semantic Web technology can facilitate information collection from several sources for energy analysis. Semantic Web enables sharing, accessing, and combining information over the Internet in a machine process-able format. This would free building designers to concentrate on building design optimization rather than spending time on data preparation and manual entry into energy analysis applications