This research aims to provide the possibility to the business analysts to be able to know whether their design business processes are feasible or not. In order to solve this problem, we proposed a model called BPMNSemAuto that makes use of the existing services stored in the service registry UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration). From the data extracted from the UDDI, the WSDL files and the tracking data of service execution on the server, a Web Service Ontology (WSOnto) is generated to store all the existing services. The BPMNSemAuto model takes an input of business process design specifications, and it generates an executable business process as an output. It provides an interface for business analysts to specify the description of each service task of the design business process. For each service task, the business analysts specify the task objective (keywords), inputs, outputs and weights of the Quality of Service (QoS) properties. From the design business process with the service task specifications, a Business Process Ontology (BPOnto) is generated. A service selection algorithm performs the mapping between the instances of the WSOnto and the BPOnto to obtain possible mappings between these two ontologies. The obtained mappings help the model to acquire web services to execute the desired service tasks. Moreover, the consistency checking of the inputs of the proposed model is performed before executing the service selection algorithm. WordNet is used to solve the synonym problems and at the same time a keyword extraction method is presented in this paper.
The Workflow Management Coalition provides a definition of Business Process, saying that "it is a set of one or more linked procedures or activities which collectively realize a business objective or policy goal, normally within the context of an organizational structure defining functional roles and relationships" [1]. Rummler and Brache defined business process as "the series of steps that a business executes to produce a product or service" [2]. The business process applications can be modeled with different modelling specifications such as BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) [3], Petri Net [4,5], Workflow and UML (Unified Modeling Language). This research study focuses on the modelling of business processes with BPMN specifications (BPMN2.0). Some examples of business process modeled with BPMN are presented in [6], such as "handling and invoicing process application", "taxi reservation application" and "online purchasing application". Correia and Abreu [7] state that "A BPMN2 process model diagram has around 100 different modeling constructs, including 51 event types, 8 gateway types, 7 data types, 4 types of activities, 6 activity markers, 7 task types, 4 flow types, pools, lanes, etc." However, this research work considers only the automatic implementation of the service task (one kind of task type) by using the existing services stored in the service registry UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration).
A service task can be performed by a web service or a composite service. The web service is a software module created to perform a specific business task. It is described by the service description languages such as WSDL (Web Service Description Language) and WSDL-S (Web Service Description Language-Semantic). These languages provide different capabilities, for example, WSDL cannot store the pre-condition and post-condition of a service but WSDL-S and OWL-S do.
Researchers use the ontology to represent the semantic meaning of services and as a knowledge base. The Ontology is an explicit specification and hierarchy of different concepts. It defines properties, characteristics and behaviors of objects in the same domain; and it expresses the relationships between concepts [8]. An ontology consists of three elements: vocabularies, specifications and constraints. The vocabularies describe the domain of ontology and the constraints are used to capture knowledge about the ontology’s domain. The specifications define the relationships between different concepts of the ontology. Moreover, some ontology languages have been proposed such as RDF, DAML-OIL, WSMO, OWL and OWL-2. This research study builds a Web Service Ontology for the semantic representation of the services stored in the service registry (UDDI).
Globally, this research study aims to provide an automatic implementation of business processes by re-using the existing web services stored in the service registry. A model called BPMNSemAuto is proposed and takes the input of business process design specifications by the users; and it generates an output of an executable business process. After designing the business processes, the business analyst provides the specifications of each service task through a user interface such as context, inputs, outputs and weight. After that the BPMNSemAuto model performs the service selection and composition to choose the most suitable services to execute every service task. The service selection is done by comparison between the ontology represents the user’s requirements and Web Service Ontology; and it uses the QoS (Quality of Service) values to rank the matched services.
This work targets some research problems such as: (i) Semantic representation of the existing web services and the users’ requirements. It is because the service registry UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) supports only keywords matching and does not store the non-functional properties of web services. However, the non-functional properties of services are the important criteria of the service selection algorithm. (ii) A service selection and composition algorithm. (iii) A solution to solve the problems of synonyms because organizations usually use their own specific terms to name business elements and web services.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2, “Related Works”, presents the current existing solutions related to this research study. Section 3, “Proposed Solution”, introduces the proposed model architecture, the web service ontology structure and a keywords extraction method. Finally, this paper is finished by a conclusion and future work.
Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is a standard notation for modeling the business processes. It bridges the gap between the design and the implementation of the business processes. The primary goal of BPMN is “to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts that create the ini
This content is AI-processed based on open access ArXiv data.
