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An Ontology for Internal and External Business Processes ABSTRACT

An Ontology for Internal and External Business Processes?

Armin Haller Digital Enterprise Research

Institute

Galway,Ireland armin.haller@https://www.sodocs.net/doc/6612412716.html,

Eyal Oren

Digital Enterprise Research

Institute

Galway,Ireland

eyal.oren@https://www.sodocs.net/doc/6612412716.html,

Paavo Kotinurmi

Helsinki University of

T echnology

Helsinki,Finland

paavo.kotinurmi@hut.?

ABSTRACT

In this paper we introduce our multi metamodel process on-tology(m3po),which is based on various existing reference models and languages from the work?ow and choreography domain.This ontology allows the extraction of arbitrary choreography interface descriptions from arbitrary internal work?ow models.We also report on an initial validation:we

translate an IBM Websphere MQ Work?ow model into the m3po ontology and then extract an Abstract BPEL model from the ontology.

Categories and Subject Descriptors:H.4.1[Informa-tion Systems Applications]:O?ce Automation—Work?ow management

General Terms:Languages

Keywords:Choreography,Work?ow Modelling,Ontology, Meta Model Integration.

1.INTRODUCTION

Organisations have long used process modelling to de-scribe the dynamic behaviour of their business.Work?ow Management Systems(WfMSs)are commonly applied for process modelling and allow to describe and execute business processes.With the advent of Service Oriented Computing organisations started to expose their business functionality explicitly as reusable and composable services.To interact with these services organisations o?er choreography inter-faces,stating conversational patterns in which the services can be consumed.

A fundamental lack in current choreography frameworks such as Abstract BPEL and WS-CDL is the disconnection between external choreography interfaces and internal work-?ow descriptions.Conceptually,a choreography interface can

be regarded as an abstracted view on a business process (c.f.[2,7,1]),but current choreography frameworks ignore this dependency relation.A major obstacle in connecting internal processes and external choreographies is the variety in existing work?ow languages,work?ow metamodels,and choreography languages[8].Directly translating from work-?ow languages to choreography languages would require n2 mappings,for each combination of work?ow and choreogra-phy language.

?This material is based upon works supported by the Science Foundation Ireland under Grant No.SFI/04/BR/CS0694.

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).

WWW2006,May23–26,2006,Edinburgh,Scotland.

ACM1-59593-332-9/06/0005.

Figure1describes our approach to connect work?ows and choreography descriptions.We develop an intermediate uni-fying work?ow ontology that can represent arbitrary work-?ows,thus reducing the amount of required mappings to 2n.This ontology can be used to represent internal process models,and from the ontology choreography interfaces(cor-responding to the internal process model)can be extracted.

models

workflow

models

Figure1:Connecting work?ow models to extract choreography interfaces

2.ONTOLOGY

The multi metamodel process ontology(m3po)is based on two principles:to incorporate and unify the di?erent ex-isting work?ow metamodels and work?ow reference models, and to provide the necessary properties for extracting chore-ographies from internal business processes.To facilitate the extraction of the external view on a work?ow the m3po al-lows a work?ow engineer to mark the visibility of tasks to di?erent collaboration roles.Thus multiple views on the underlying work?ow model can be extracted.

For the integration of work?ow models the m3po is organ-ised around the?ve key work?ow aspects[4]widely recog-nised as essential work?ow characteristics.We have com-bined the most elaborate existing reference metamodels per aspect in our ontology.The target of our ontology are choreography speci?cation languages such as WS-CDL or Abstract BPEL.Thus we further extended the m3po with choreography-speci?c information.The choreography re-lated concepts provided in the m3po are a superset of the modelling primitives o?ered in these languages.

Our hypothesis is that constructing the ontology through a careful analysis of existing reference models and work?ow languages,guarantees the representational width of the on-tology,i.e.that all existing work?ow models can be repre-sented and all existing choreography interfaces can be ex-tracted from it.

The ontology is written in the WSML

[3]

ontology lan-guage,making the semantics of the process concepts formal and explicit —necessary given the di?erent semantics of work?ow meta-models.The behavioural semantics in the ontology are de?ned similarly to the one of the PSL on-tology [6]with occurrence graphs,which are isomorphic to substructures of the situation tree from situation calculus.Given the space limitations,we only display the key con-cepts of the ontology in a UML class diagram;a thorough To validate our hypothesis we ?rst need to show that in-deed all metamodels can be represented,and then that arbi-trary choreography interfaces can be extracted.We report on an initial result,namely the mapping from one WfMS (IBM Websphere MQ Work?ow)into our ontology,and the mapping to one choreography language (Abstract BPEL),as shown in ?gure 3.

Figure 3:extracting a choreography interface First we mapped the IBM Websphere MQ Work?ow model to the m3po .Second,we annotated this model,added chore-ography speci?c concepts and denoted the visibility of tasks to speci?c collaboration roles.Finally we mapped from this extended internal work?ow represented according to our on-tology 1to an Abstract BPEL description 2.

4.RELATED WORK

Our work is most closely related to several approaches to views on process models.Chebbi et al.[1]propose a view model with cooperative activities that can be partially for di?erent partners,but the approach requires n 2and does not consider data (message transfer).et al.[2]present a meta-model that includes cross-organisational communications.The approach is speci?c to work?ow modelling tool,and does not o?er integrated extraction.Schulz and Orlowska [7]introduce state-transition approach that binds states of private work-tasks to a corresponding view-task;they do not describe to integrate di?erent work?ow models,and abstract the aspect completely.Sayal et al.[5]introduce service ac-(that represent trade partner interaction)as work-primitives.Their approach is speci?c to one work?ow tool and addresses neither work?ow integration choreography interface extraction.

CONCLUSION

We have presented the multi meta-model process ontology m3po ).It is unique in the combination of work?ow primi-and support for choreography-speci?c concepts.It can as connecting ontology to integrate work?ow models and choreography interface extraction.We showed that can straightforwardly generate a complete and correct BPEL interface from the annotated m3po ontology an example validation.To further verify the hypothesis any process model can be mapped to the m3po ,more is still required on the construction of mappings from WfMSs and choreography languages to our ontology.

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1full listing at https://www.sodocs.net/doc/6612412716.html,/ontologies/rfq.wsml 2

full listing at https://www.sodocs.net/doc/6612412716.html,/ontologies/rfq.bpel

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