Towards an Ontology for Automating Collaborative Business Processes

Automation of business transactions between trading partners is an important factor in today's global business. XML based e-Business standards are developed to provide a shared understanding on what information to share, when and how between trading partners. However these standards can only capture the syntax of the transactions and not the semantics. This paper presents an ontology for ebXML Business Process Specification Schema (ebBP), with the aim of empowering the capture and sharing semantics embedded within B2B processes, enabling knowledge deduction and reasoning over this shared knowledge. The ebBP ontology presented covers both syntax included in the ebBP XML schema and the informal semantics of the ebBP specification and is fundamentally different from an automatic transformation of XML to OWL. This ontology is evaluated against a set of competency questions, using a publicly available ordering process. This paper demonstrates how semantic web technologies can be utilised in order to improve standards-based interoperability between trading partners.