Ontology-Based Business Process Customization for Composite Web Services

A key goal of the Semantic Web is to shift social interaction patterns from a producer-centric paradigm to a consumer-centric one. Treating customers as the most valuable assets and making the business models work better for them are at the core of building successful consumer-centric business models. It follows that customizing business processes constitutes a major concern in the realm of a knowledge-pull-based human semantic Web. This paper conceptualizes the customization of service-based business processes leveraging the existing knowledge of Web services and business processes. We represent this conceptualization as a new Extensible Markup Language (XML) markup language Web Ontology Language-Business Process Customization (OWL-BPC), based on the de facto semantic markup language for Web-based information [Web Ontology Language (OWL)]. Furthermore, we report a framework, built on OWL-BPC, for customizing service-based business processes, which supports customization detection and enactment. Customization detection is enabled by a business-goal analysis, and customization enactment is enabled via event-condition-action rule inference. Our solution and framework have the following capabilities in dealing with inconsistencies and misalignments in business process interactions: 1) resolve semantic mismatch of process parameters; 2) handle behavioral mismatches which may or may not be compatible; and 3) process misaligned rendezvous requirements. Such capabilities are applicable to business processes with heterogeneous domain ontology. We present an architectural description of the implementation and a walk-through of an example of solving a customization problem as a validation of the proposed approach.