Compositional Logical Semantics for Business Process Languages

In this paper we propose a compositional logical semantics for business process languages to be used in automatic Web service composition. We introduce a concept of higher order work flow (HOWF) and use it for expressing control of business process. A precise semantics of HOWF enables us both to dynamically generate HOWF for automatic composition of services and to reason about the reachability of goals in process models when HOWF are described manually. Our semantics is general enough to cover different process languages; however, we mainly show its applicability in the context of OWLS and BPEL.