Mapping a Business Process Model to a Semantic Web Service Model

Guo, Mr. Li and Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh and Robertson, Dr. Dave (2004) Mapping a Business Process Model to a Semantic Web Service Model. In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Web Services, San Diego, California, USA ..

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OWL-S is used to support automated discovery, composition, invocation and monitoring of web services. Its process model is a typical type of web service model that might be used to express a business process model and could be processed by an agent automatically. Furthermore, OWL-S promises to provide semantics for web services. However, OWL-S is an XML based syntax that is hard to use for those with little XML knowledge, which presents obstacles at requirements capture and design stages. In contrast, diagram based business process modelling languages like FBPML include standard process constructs familiar to this target user group. Such methods are semantically richer than an OWL-S styled modelling language, but do not provide direct inputs for web service development and cannot be used by agent systems straightforwardly. In order to bridge this gap, automatic translation from diagram based business process models to web services models is necessary. In this paper, we have provided such a translation by applying conceptual mapping techniques, demonstrated by using concrete mapping examples from FBPML notations to the OWL-S process ontology. We also have implemented a system which translates FBPML models to OWL-S process models automatically according to our conceptual mapping principles. Model constructs that cannot easily be expressed using OWL-S are also identified.

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