Querying Business Processes and Ontologies in a Logic Programming Environment (Extended Abstract)

In recent years there has been an acceleration towards new forms of cooperation between enterprises, such as virtual enterprises, networked enterprises, or business ecosystems. A networked enterprise integrates the resources and Business Processes (BPs) of the participating organizations allowing them to operate as a unique (vitual) organization. In particular, starting from a set of BPs that exist in the various participating enterprises, the objective is to build a global BP by selecting the local BPs to be included. This operation is not an easy one, since the local BPs are often built by using different tools, according to different business logics, and using different labels and terminology to denote activities and resources. To this end, the various participating enterprises need to agree on a common view of the business domain, and provide descriptions of the local BPs according to such agreed common view. Much work has been done towards the enhancement of BP management systems [1] by means of well-established techniques from the area of the Semantic Web and, in particular, computational ontologies [2]. An enterprise ontology supports unambiguous definitions of the entities occurring in the domain, and eases the interoperability between software applications and the reuse/exchange of knowledge between human actors. In this frame, we focus on the problem of querying repositories of semantically annotated BPs. The proposed solution is based on a synergic use of an ontological framework (OPAL [3]) aimed at capturing the semantics of a business scenario, and a business process modelling framework (BPAL [4]) to represent the workflow logic. Then, the semantic annotation of BPs w.r.t. ontologies allows us to query BPs in terms of the ontology vocabulary, easing the retrieval of local BP (or process fragments) to be reused in the composition of new BPs. Figure 1 depicts a birds-eye view of the querying approach, with the local BP repositories (LBPRx), the common set of ontologies and vocabularies (Reference Ontology) used for the semantic annotation (Σx ) of the BP repositories, and the query engine operating on the above structures.