Semantic business process management: a vision towards using semantic web services for business process management

Business process management (BPM) is the approach to manage the execution of IT-supported business operations from a business expert's view rather than from a technical perspective. However, the degree of mechanization in BPM is still very limited, creating inertia in the necessary evolution and dynamics of business processes, and BPM does not provide a truly unified view on the process space of an organization. We trace back the problem of mechanization of BPM to an ontological one, i.e. the lack of machine-accessible semantics, and argue that the modeling constructs of semantic Web services frameworks, especially WSMO, are a natural fit to creating such a representation. As a consequence, we propose to combine SWS and BPM and create one consolidated technology, which we call semantic business process management (SBPM

Issues about the Adoption of Formal Methods for Dependable Composition of Web Services

Web Services provide interoperable mechanisms for describing, locating and invoking services over the Internet; composition further enables to build complex services out of simpler ones for complex B2B applications. While current studies on these topics are mostly focused - from the technical viewpoint - on standards and protocols, this paper investigates the adoption of formal methods, especially for composition. We logically classify and analyze three different (but interconnected) kinds of important issues towards this goal, namely foundations, verification and extensions. The aim of this work is to individuate the proper questions on the adoption of formal methods for dependable composition of Web Services, not necessarily to find the optimal answers. Nevertheless, we still try to propose some tentative answers based on our proposal for a composition calculus, which we hope can animate a proper discussion

Mediation of semantic web services in IRS-III

Business applications composed of heterogeneous distributed components or Web services need mediation to resolve data and process mismatches at runtime. This paper describes mediation in IRS-III, a framework and platform for developing WSMO-based Semantic Web Services. We present our approach to mediation within Semantic Web Services and highlight the role of WSMO mediator types when solving mismatches at the semantic level between a service requester and a service provider. We describe the components of our mediation framework and how it can handle data, goal and process mediation during the activities of selection, composition and invocation of Semantic Web Services