Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Web Services-based business processes spread over the boundaries of companies, requiring the integration of customers, suppliers and partners to achieve inter-organizational business goals. According to organizational rules temporal constraints, like deadlines, must be defined for processes. Violation of these constraints usually results in increased cost and reduced quality of service. Advanced workflow time management approaches allow the prediction of eventually arising time constraint violations and enables proactive initiation of evasive ”self healing” actions. This saves time, avoids unnecessary task-compensations and therefor decreases costs. In this paper we present an architecture for Web Service Composition environments which enables the usage of advanced predictive and proactive time management features.

In this paper, we define a reference conceptual framework to organize and related for coordinated and virtual access to heterogeneous and distributed information resources inside and outside the enterprise, at both intra- and inter-enterprise level under different collaboration requirements and goals. The framework exploits ontology knowledge spaces and enabling services for searching and retrieving the relevant information resources, namely those semantically related to a target request, both in a stable and emergent collaboration scenarios.

The paper presents the outcomes of a practical experiment aimed at the identification of the various types of annotations that can be attached to enterprise strategic data models. The work is part of a more extensive experimentation on different enterprise models perspectives developed inside the ”Semantic Enrichment of Models and Architecture & Platforms” task group of the FP6 IST-508-011 NoE INTEROP, whose goal is to evaluate the appropriateness (and the possible incompleteness) of existing semantic enrichment concepts, techniques, services and tools. Besides the need for multiple ontologies, the experiment enlighten a rather new perspective with respect to the literature on semantic annotation, related to the fact that mathematical objects have to be taken into consideration.

Nowadays, many data- and/or computation-intensive applications in the area of e-science and e-business involve coordinated sharing of highly distributed resources in a grid environment. In this context, a collaborative workflow management system is always required as part of the sophisticated problem solving process. Efficient management of workflow in grid environments has become increasingly important. Issues such as grid workflow infrastructure based on the Grid toolkits, grid workflow modeling and specification, grid workflow verification and validation, and decentralized grid workflow execution based on peer-to-peer technology have already evoked a high degree of interest.

With the success of the 1st workshop, which was held in Melbourne, Australia in 2005, the 2nd International Workshop on Grid and Peer-to-Peer based Workflows (GPWW) was held in conjunction with the 4th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2006), in Vienna, Austria. The aim of this workshop was to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry and governments to report advances in grid and peer-to-peer based workflow research.

In this position paper, we propose a new generation workflow system for grid services. We observe that grid computing has become an increasingly important application domain in computer science. Grid services — a new technology based on web services — are expected to become the de facto standard for grid computing. Similar to web services, an effective mechanism is needed for the composition of grid services. Existing technologies, however, have a number of important drawbacks: they have limited or no support for modularization of crosscutting concerns, for dynamic workflow adaptation, and for high-performance computing. We propose a new generation workflow system that is tailored specifically for grid services, and that tackles these problems, among others.

To cope with the competitiveness of the market place, e-business applications should be developed exploiting the flexibility of service oriented paradigm and the challenges of the grid computing technologies and should guarantee the fulfillment of quality requirements. In this paper we present a reference framework to support the execution of Web services based e-business applications in autonomic grid environments. Specifically, we tackle the problem of selection of Web services that assure the optimum mapping between each abstract Web service of a business process and a Web service which implements the abstract description, such that the overall quality of service perceived by the user is maximized. The proposed solution guarantees the fulfillment of global constraints, considers variable quality of service profile of component Web services and the long term process execution.

Web service technology is a representative means of heterogeneous system integration and communication. Process language standards, such as WS-BPEL and WS-CDL, have accelerated the usability of web services in business area. However, recently emerging web service devices in ubiquitous environments still have a difficulty in coordinating their processes because of the limited computing power and storage. This research proposes a framework of event-based process enactment for ubiquitous web service devices. The framework adopts P2P architecture where devices communicate with one another via web services eventing. The schema of ECA rules and messaging protocol are presented for P2P process enactment so that service devices can interact each other and accomplish their process execution based on the ECA rules. Our proposed framework is expected to be useful in ubiquitous service environments since it enables a scalable and light-weighted process enactment through event-based web service technology.

BPEL4WS is a well-established business process standard that can be used to orchestrate service-based workflows. However, the rapid growth and automation demands of e-business and grid applications require BPEL4WS to provide enhanced semantic annotations to achieve the goal of business processes automation. Here, OWL-S (OWL for Web Services) is designed to represent such kind of semantic information. Furthermore, there exists a similarity in the conceptual model of OWL-S and BPEL4WS that can be employed to overcome the lack of semantics in BPEL4WS by mapping the BPEL4WS process model to the OWL-S suite of ontologies. The mapped OWL-S service can be used to increase flexibility and to automate BPEL based grid scenarios even further. This is achieved by dynamic discovery, composition and invocation of OWL-S services, for example within e-business and grid environments. Hence, the aim of this paper is to establish a mapping from the BPEL process model to the complete OWL-S suite of ontologies. We present a mapping strategy and a tool supporting this strategy. This allows the semantic annotation of workflows defined as BPEL4WS processes to enable the automation of a variety of e-business tasks.

The premise behind ‘third wave’ Business Process Management (BPM) is effective support for change at levels. Business Process Modeling (BPM) notations such as BPMN are used to effectively conceptualize and communicate process configurations to relevant stakeholders. In this paper we argue that the management of change throughout the business process model lifecycle requires greater conceptual support achieved via a combination of complementary notations. As such the focus in this paper is on the co-evolution of operational (BPMN) and organizational (*) models. Our intent is to provide a way of expressing changes, which arise in one model, effectively in the other model. We present constrained development methodologies capable of guiding an analyst when reflecting changes from an * model to a BPMN model and vice-versa.

These proceedings contain the papers accepted for presentation at the “Advances in Semantics for Web services (semantics4ws 2006)” workshop held in Vienna, Austria, on September 4, 2006, in conjunction with the Fourth International Conference on Business Process Mangement (BPM 2006).

The main topics of this workshop are related to applicability of semantic technologies to Web services. Web services have added a new level of functionality to the current Web by taking a first step towards seamless integration of distributed software components using Web standards. Nevertheless, current Web service technologies around SOAP, WSDL and UDDI operate at a syntactic level and, therefore, although they support interoperability (i.e., interoperability between the many diverse application development platforms that exist today) through common standards, they still require human interaction to a large extent. For example, the human programmer has to manually search for appropriate Web services in order to combine them in a useful manner, which limits scalability and greatly curtails the added economic value envisioned with the advent of Web services.