Mapping Web services specifications to process Ontology: Opportunities and limitations

There are many XML based workflow and process modeling languages like XPDL, BPEL4WS etc. that can be used to define workflow and business processes in the Web services world. However, the use of XML makes the meaning of the processes ambiguous with limited capability to describe the relationships (semantics, schemas or ontologies) with respect to objects. Put into action, it becomes obvious that the integration of Web services will be hardly achieved without certain schema matching mechanisms supported by higher level abstraction. In this paper, the authors have developed a tool to support the mapping of business processes defined in BPEL4WS onto DAML-S based process ontology. This will overcome the weaknesses of the evolving BPEL4WS language; provide a powerful way to describe the objects and their relationships; and reduce the overhead of combinations required when mapping a BPEL4WS specification to other process definition languages.