m3po: An Ontology for Internal and External Business Processes

1. Organisation A Organisation B WorkflowModel A WorkflowModel B WorkflowModel … WorkflowModel A WorkflowModel B WorkflowModel … m3po: An Ontology for Internal and External Business Processes Armin Haller, Eyal Oren, Paavo Kotinurmi • INTRODUCTION • WHAT ARE CHOREOGRAPHY INTERFACES? • Choreography Interface (also called public processes, abstract processes, or provider behaviour) describe how to interact with a Web Service to consume its functionality • External Visible Behavior • Only describes those aspects of an internal workflow model where interaction with the web service is required • Behavioural ordering of message sends and receives • Process modelling to describe dynamic behaviour of businesses • Workflow Management Systems are used for process modelling • Organisations expose business functionality as Web Services and provide choreography interface descriptions to define conversational patterns in which a Web service can be consumed • Lack in current choreography frameworks (BPEL, WS-CDL) is disconnection between external choreography interfaces and internal workflow descriptions Buyer Seller Request for Process RFQ Quote ( RFQ ) Send Receive RFQ RFQ Check Product Availability Receive Send Referral Referral Prepare Referral Choreography Interface (Buyer) Choreography Interface (Seller) Process Quote Quote Response Receive Send Quote Quote • ONTOLOGY • Disconnection between choreography interfaces and workflow definitions leads to two major problems: • choreography interfaces have to be manually designed and synchronised with internal workflow descriptions • and consistency with regard to the internal process can not be verified • m3po is unique in the combination of workflow primitives and support for choreography-specific concepts. The ontology can act as a connecting ontology to integrate different workflow models (horizontal integration) and allows extraction of external process models (vertical integration). • constructed based on an analysis of existing models • written in the web ontology language WSML, making the semantics of the process concepts formal and explicit • Full ontology including axiomatisation of its semantics can be found at http://m3pe.org/ontologies/m3po • APPROACH • Figure 2 describes our approach to connect internal Workflow Models and choreography descriptions. We developed an intermediate unifying workflow ontology (m3po) that can represent arbitrary workflows, thus reducing the number of required mappings to 2n. • Methodology to generate choreography interface descriptions: Excerpt of a Simple Process Ontology Instance ... instance cpa memberOf activityType hasName hasValue "Check Product Availability" hasTask hasValue checkStockApplication hasSplitRestriction hasValue availableCondition instance pr memberOf messageEvent hasName hasValue "Prepare Referral" hasJoinRestriction hasValue notAvailable hasMessage hasValue referral isVisibleFor hasValue buyer instance qr memberOf messageEvent hasName hasValue "Quote Response" hasJoinRestriction hasValue available hasMessage hasValue quote isVisibleFor hasValue buyer instance cpaToPr memberOf dataConnector hasStartActivity hasValue cpa hasEndActivity hasValue pr hasParameter hasValue cpaInOutPr instance cpaToQr memberOf dataConnector hasStartActivity hasValue cpa hasEndActivity hasValue qr hasParameter hasValue cpaInOutQr ... • Identify aspects in the Workflow Models (WfMs) • For each aspect, identify the concepts in the model. • For each concept, identify an equivalent concept in m3po. • Construct algorithm that translates WfMs into m3po. • Construct algorithm that translates from m3po to any choreography description language (BPEL etc.) Abstract BPELInterface WS-CDLInterface ... multi meta-model process ontology (m3po) YAWLWorkflow IBM MQ Workflow ... Armin Haller P: +353 91 495139 E: armin.haller@deri.org www.m3pe.org