Translating Fundamental Business Process Modelling Language to a Semantic Web-Based Language
Bridging the gap between Enterprise Modelling methods such as BPM methods and Semantic Web services is an important yet challenging task. For organisations with business goals, the automation of business processes as Web services is increasingly important, especially with many business transactions taking place within the Web today. Semantic Web technologies are becoming increasingly important with the vision to provide for better machine-processability and automated reasoning through the annotation of information with meaning. Such provision, ultimately, would enable better cooperation between computers and people. However, Semantic Web technologies are still evolving rapidly and could be strengthened by the incorporation of more mature technologies such as BPM methods.
Taking one approach to address this problem, a lightweight mapping between Fundamental Business Process Modelling Language (FBPML) and the Web Services Ontology (OWL-S) was performed. The framework entails a data model translation and a process model translation via the use of ontologies and mapping principles.
FBPML is an inherited, specialised and combined version of several standard modelling languages, in particular it merges two established process languages; Process Specification Language (PSL) and Integrated DEFinition Language (IDEF3). The former has rich semantics but does not have a visual representation, while the latter provides a mature modelling method and graphical notations but no formal semantic for its notation. FBPML is formal and visual, which implies that it provides an abstraction that is separated from the actual implementation, thus it is a suitable choice of BPM language.
OWL-S is a Web service ontology that facilitates the automation of Web service tasks, including automated Web service discovery, execution, composition and interoperation. It is written in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and is the recommended language for Web services by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). OWL-S is more mature in some aspects such as process model definition and the grounding of Web services than other Semantic Web-based languages.
The mapping framework manipulates the structural similarity between the two languages that are both divided into data and process components. The mapping of data models between FBPML and OWL-S involves the translation of representations of concepts (or classes), instances (of the concepts) and the relationships between the concepts and instances from FBPML's data language (FBPML DL) to OWL. It also entails the translation of representations of properties and restrictions (or constraints) from FBPML DL to OWL and OWL-S's rule language. Ontologies were used to represent the data models of both languages and the formalisms to describe the mapping of classes, instances, relationships and constraints were derived.
The process model translation entailed the translation between FBPML's process language (FBPML PL) and OWL-S. Both process models were represented ontologically and the formalisms to map the process components between the two languages were derived. Once the matching primitives were identified, the process models were further mapped using the following principles; i) Decomposition of FBPML process model in a top-down order, ii) Translation of model into an OWL-S sequence process, iii) All activities between start and finish nodes are composite components of the sequence process, and iv) Exhaustive decomposition of each composite component into a sequence of its basic process component, until as far as an atomic process construct.
We provided several working examples of the process model translation, which was obtained using an automatic FBPML-to-OWL-S translator which I developed using Sicstus Prolog 3.10.1 on Linux. The conceptual mapping framework and process model translator implementation demonstrated that 80-85% of the data model components could be translated directly, while the process model components, in particular the junctions, could only be partially (or not) translated. A constituent of a FBPML process model that could not be translated is recorded in the OWL-S comment construct.
FBPML constructs and process models that could not be translated to OWL-S equivalents highlight the differences between the languages of the two domains. It also implies that evolving Semantic Web technologies, in particular OWL-S, are not adequate for all service modelling needs and could thus benefit from the more traditional and mature BPM methods. On a more interesting note, this is effectively the first step towards enabling a semantics-based business workflow system, and in a wider context this aims to bring business-oriented and technical-oriented communities closer in order to achieve common organisational goals.