Semantic Annotations for Workflow Interoperability

Abstract

To support the interoperability or the cooperation between different partners, various approaches and
technological solutions were proposed, which converge directly to the adoption of standards.
Consequently, the semantic aspect is not correctly addressed by today's interoperability solutions that
focus mainly on the syntactical and technical level. Indeed, addressing the semantic aspect at
conceptual level will provide more flexibility to the cooperation. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose
an agnostic approach for the interoperability of Workflow models (or business process), which is used
in a homogeneous or in a heterogeneous context. In a homogeneous context, lexical and structural
annotations are attached to models. Contrary, in a heterogeneous context, we introduce a common
semantic annotation structure for annotating the models at different levels: 1) meta-models, 2) models
content, 3) models profiles and goals for semantic discovery purposes, 4) at levels of basic aspects of
models such as the informational type. Common ontologies, including: Workflow ontology, domain
specific ontology, profiles ontology, goals ontology and a set of ontologies related to these aspects, are
used to achieve semantic interoperability. One of the advantages of this proposal is its flexibility and its
openness since we take an agnostic approach to ontology representation languages (such as OWL-S or
WSDL-S).