From BPEL4WS to OWL-S: integrating e-business process descriptions

With the rapid deployment of e-services, many workflow-like e-business process definition languages come into existence. At the same time, ontology Web language for services (OWL-S) aims to build an ontology language to support the integration of various specifications. There has been some work on mapping WSDL (Web services description language) to OWL-S to build a connection between the Web service and service profile. However, in the sense of activity relationships, there has been no effort so far trying to build the OWL-S service model from a workflow process model. Therefore, we design and develop an innovative mapping tool to translate BPEL4WS (business process execution language for Web services) to OWL-S. Through this mapping, semantics in the traditional business process specifications can be enriched significantly to enable more flexible and automatic e-service functions by using existing OWL-S tools such as composition and discovery, especially the execution of workflow-based services.