Ontology-Based Querying of Composite Services

Enterprises are evolving towards advanced forms of cooperation and networking. This kind of tight cooperation requires the creation of global Business Processes (i.e., cross-enterprise composite services) composed starting from a set of existing local processes (exposed, in turn, as services) found in different enterprises. To this end, in this chapter we present an ontology-based approach for querying business process repositories for the retrieval of process fragments to be reused in the composition of new business processes. The proposed solution is based on a synergic use of a business process modelling framework (BPAL) to represent the workflow logic of business processes, and business ontologies, aimed at capturing the semantics of a business scenario. Both components are grounded in logic programming and therefore it is possible to apply effective reasoning methods to query the knowledge base stemming from the fusion of the two.