Abstract. Artifacts are entities characterized by data of interest (constituting the state of the artifact) in a given business application, and a lifecycle, which constrains the artifact’s possible evolutions. In this paper we study relational artifacts, where data are represented by a full fledged relational database, and the lifecycle is described by a temporal/dynamic formula expressed in µ-calculus. We then consider business processes, modeled as a set of condition/action rules, in which the execution of actions (aka tasks, or atomic services) results in new artifact states. We study conformance of such processes wrt the artifact lifecycle as well as verification of temporal/dynamic properties expressed in µ-calculus. Notice that such systems are infinite-state in general, hence undecidable. However, inspired by recent literature on database dependencies developed for data exchange, we present a natural restriction that makes such systems finite-state, and the above problems decidable. 1

We present a formal investigation of artifact-based systems, a relatively novel framework in service oriented computing, aimed at laying the foundations for verifying these systems through model checking. We present an infinite-state, computationally grounded semantics for these systems that allows us to reason about temporal-epistemic specifications. We present abstraction techniques for the semantics that guarantee transfer of satisfaction from the abstract system to the concrete one. 1

Abstract. We introduce semantic artifacts, which are a mechanism that provides both a semantically rich representation of the information on the domain of interest in terms of an ontology, including the underlying data, and a set of actions to change such information over time. In this paper, the ontology is specified as a DL-Lite TBox together with an ABox that may contain both (known) constants and unknown individuals (labeled nulls, represented as Skolem terms). Actions are specified as sets of conditional effects, where conditions are based on conjunctive queries over the ontology (TBox and ABox), and effects are expressed in terms of new ABoxes. In this setting, which is obviously not finite state, we address the verification of temporal/dynamic properties expressed in µ-calculus. Notably, we show decidability of verification, under a suitable restriction inspired by the notion of acyclicity in data exchange. 1

Abstract. In this paper we show how one can use the technology developed recently for Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) to govern data-aware processes through ontologies. In particular, we consider processes executed over a relational database which issue calls to external services to acquire new information and update the data. We equip these processes with an OBDA system, in which an ontology modeling the domain of interest is connected through declarative mappings to the database, and that consequently allows one to understand and govern the manipulated information at the conceptual level. In this setting, we are interested in verifying first-order μ-calculus formulae specifying temporal properties over the evolution of the information at the conceptual level. Specifically, we show how, building on first-order rewritability of queries over the system state that is typical of OBDA, we are able to reformulate the temporal properties into temporal properties expressed over the underlying database. This allows us to adopt notable decidability results on verification of evolving databases that have been established recently. 1