Business Process Modeling Onotlogy
The BPMO provides a framework consisting of all the elements
needed for defining the business processes. Following the infrastructure
proposed by WSMO, the BPMO has the following main elements:
• BPMO Ontology. The BPMO ontology is a WSMO ontology meant to
define the domain of the processes that are to be modeled; as such, it
defines the infrastructure for providing the underlying information needed
for further modeling the processes.
• BPMO Business Process. The BPMO Business Process defines the main
elements of business processes; it strongly relies on the WSMO Web Service
definition, and provides additional support for business process modeling.
• BPMO Business Goal. The BPMO Business Goal defines the infrastructure
for expressing the request for a business process, more exactly the request
for a business process functionality.
• BPMO Mediators The BPMO Mediators define the types of mediators
needed for business process mediation, and they have the same semantic definition
as the WSMO mmediators
SemBiz Modeler
The SemBiz Modeler represents a GUI tools which provides graphical support for the BPMO elements creation and further editing. The Modeler is implemented as a collection of plug-ins for the Eclipse framework. Inheriting the already existing functionality, the Modeler enables access to the SemBiz Repository through the existing SVN support. It is developed as an extension of the Web Service Modeling Toolkit (WSMT) which is an integrated development environment that enables developers to develop Ontologies, Web Services, Goals and Mediators through the Web Service Modeling Language (WSML) formalism of WSMO.
SemBiz Repository
Based on the Subversion version control system it provides for the vertical storage support which considers all relevant information during the life cycle of semantic business process management (involving processes, rules, roles, data, events and logs). The Web Service interface of the repository enables remote accessibility to the provided functionality.
Functional Composition
The functional composition engine is able to automatically solve composition tasks that conform to the *forward effects* special case. Informally, a task has forward effects if the capabilities (of BPMO business processes) output new constants and all ramifications concern only propositions that involve at least one new constant. To overcome large search spaces (of partial compositions), we control the search via heuristic techniques. Our heuristic function is admissible, allowing us to achieve optimality up to a constant factor by combining it with a weighted A* search strategy.
For further details on the search space of the tool, as well as the integrated optimizations, please check the section on Functional Composition in the SemBiz deliverables D2.2 and D2.3
Semantic Discovery
The semantic discovery engine is an adaptation to BPMO business processes of a discovery engine from the standard WSMX distribution. It matches business goals and business processes using query containment, where the containment is determined using a frozen facts algorithm.
The semantic discovery has a high precision, returning only business processes that are relevant to the business goal. However, it requires a certain expressivity in the semantic description of the business processes and business goals, expressivity achieved through the pre and postconditions present in the functional descriptions of business entities.
Semantic Query
The semantic query engine integrated in the SemBiz BPMSuite consists of the Eclipse plugins corresponding to ontology reasoning in the Web Service Modeling Toolkit (WSMT). The Integrated Rule Inference System (IRIS) is used as underlying datalog engine. IRIS uses a reasoning mechanism based on deductive database algorithms like semi-naive algorithms, dynamic filtering, and well-founded evaluation with alternating fixed point computation.
View-based Modelling Framework (VbMF)
The VbMF offers separated views, in which each of them represents a certain
part of the processes and services, such as the collaboration view, the
information view, the orchestration view, etc. These views can be viewed
separately to get a better understanding of a specific concern. Technically,
our concepts are realised using the model–driven software development
(MDSD) paradigm. We have chosen this approach to integrate the various
view models and to automatically generate BPEL and WSDL.
The functionality of transforming the VbMF views to platform specific
code has been encapsulated and exposed as a Web service for the automatic
deployment tool.
VDE Framework (VDE)
A framework that permits generic validation, deployment and execution
of business processes using
an arbitrary BPEL engine. It supports the following requirements:
• Ability to include additional BPEL engines without recompiling the framework.
• Deployment of a BPEL process on any BPEL conforming engine that is supported.
• Execution of long running deployed processes.
• Exposure of a unique interface for validation, deployment, execution and
undeployment of a BPEL process.
The functionality of the framework has been encapsulated and exposed as
a Web service for the automatic deployment tool
Deployment Tool (DT)
The SemBiz Deployment of BPMO processes is realised via a dedicated deployment
process that is triggered after functional composition. The deployment
process is a long running business process that is hosted on a process
engine.
The deployment process orchestrates the following services:
• a BPMO to EMF Translator (BPMO2VbMViews)
• the process code generation of the View-based Model Framework (VbMF)
• the deployment via the Validate/Deployment/Execute (VDE) Framework
• the execution of the process.
The deployment process has been implemented in WS-BPEL and exported with
a corresponding WSDL as a Web service and can therefore be hosted on WS-BPEL
compliant engines.
Process Monitor (PM)
The Process Monitor is a broker component for distributed logging and remote notification. While components of the SemBiz tool-chain use the Process Monitor as a remote log server a subscriber receives notifications from the Process Monitor. The integration with the various SemBiz components that use the Java Logging Framework is realised non-intrusively with an Log4J appender. WS-Notification is used as the underlying technology
